Why it works: Pork and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 37% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,579 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
Old New-york Style of Curing Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pork
Cut and trim the sides of pork.
Rub each side thickly with coarse sea salt.
Lay the pork on an inclined board and let it sit for 24 hours.
Cure
Mix together ½ cup brown sugar and 1 ounce powdered saltpetre. Rub this mixture well into the bacon.
Turn the bacon every day for 2 weeks in cool weather.
Smoke
After 2 weeks, smoke the bacon for 10 days according to smoking directions.
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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Pork + sugartop 37% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together4,579 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sides of pork
- Provides the fatty meat that becomes bacon once cured and smoked.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws out moisture and seasons the pork while helping preserve it.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.
- Powdered saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured bacon its pink colour.
The step that matters
Turning the bacon every day. Turning keeps the cure spread evenly over every surface, so salt and curing agents penetrate uniformly and no area is left under-cured or spoiled.
“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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