To Cure Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Salt the bacon
Sprinkle salt thickly over the flitches of bacon and let them lie on a brick floor overnight.
Wipe off the salt and place the flitches in a salting trough.
Cure the bacon
Mix the salt, bay salt, salt prunella, saltpetre, and sugar; divide into two parts.
Rub one half of the mixture into the bacon on the first day and rub it in well.
On the following day, rub in the other half of the mixture.
Continue to rub and turn the flitches every day for three weeks.
After three weeks, hang the flitches to cure.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it through the curing process.
- Saltpetre
- Helps the meat keep its pink colour and inhibits spoilage during long curing.
- Common moist sugar
- Balances the salt and adds mild sweetness to the cured flavour.
The step that matters
Rubbing the cure in well and turning the flitches daily. Salt and cure must reach every part of the meat evenly. Uneven coverage or skipped turning lets some areas stay under-salted and spoil, while others become too salty.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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