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.
Cure
Rub each side thickly with coarse sea salt and let them rest on an inclined board for 24 hours.
Mix together brown sugar and 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 your preferred method.
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
- The main meat that becomes bacon as it is cured and smoked.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws out moisture and seasons the pork during curing.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps balance the salt in the cure.
- Powdered saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives cured bacon its pink color.
The step that matters
Turning the bacon daily during the 2-week cure. Turning the pork every day lets the salt and saltpetre mixture penetrate evenly and keeps moisture from pooling on one side. Uneven turning can leave some areas under-cured and others overly 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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