Why it works: Meat and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,866 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓
Salting Meat for Smoking
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Trim the meat into proper joints and place it in a salting trough.
Mix the coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and brown sugar by pounding them together into a powder.
Cure
Rub this mixture thoroughly into the meat every day for four days.
Cover the meat with fresh dry coarse sea salt every day for twelve days, placing a board and a heavy weight on top.
Ensure the blood and brine drain freely from the meat.
For pork, place the skin side down.
After two weeks, the meat will be ready to smoke.
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
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Meat + sugartop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,866 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it while curing it.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat's colour and inhibits harmful bacterial growth during curing.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt.
The step that matters
Ensure the blood and brine drain freely from the meat. If liquid pools around the meat, the surface stays wet and salt penetrates unevenly, so the cure can spoil or turn out patchy. Draining lets the salt work evenly through the joints.
“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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