Why it works: Pork and molasses work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 825 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓
To Cure Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Cure the meat
Mix the salt, saltpetre, and molasses (or brown sugar) thoroughly.
Rub the mixture well onto the meat.
Pack the meat in a hogshead or tight barrel, placing hams at the bottom, shoulders next, and middlings last.
Change the meat every week for four weeks.
Smoke and finish
Hang the meat and smoke it a little every morning for three weeks.
Rub the meat well in hickory ashes or ashes from good wood.
Bag the hams and rehang them.
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 + molassestop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together825 recipes
Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Salt
- Draws out moisture and preserves the meat during the cure.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives cured meat its characteristic pink colour.
- Molasses or brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt.
The step that matters
Changing the meat every week. Salt penetrates unevenly and draws out liquid, so the pieces must be repacked regularly to keep the cure even and prevent spoilage in spots that stay wet or underseasoned.
“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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