Recipe for Curing Meat
Ingredients
Directions
Make the brine
In a large pot, combine water, coarse sea salt, sugar, and saltpetre.
Boil the mixture and skim off any foam.
Allow the brine to cool completely.
Cure the meat
Pour the cooled brine over the beef or pork until fully submerged.
Lightly sprinkle the meat with powdered saltpetre for two days to remove surface blood.
Let the meat cure in the brine for six weeks.
Smoke
Smoke with hickory wood.
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 preserves it while curing.
- Sugar
- Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured meat.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the cured colour and flavour of the meat during long curing.
The step that matters
Let the brine cool completely before adding the meat. Warm brine can partly cook the surface of the meat and encourage bacterial growth, so cooling it fully before submerging the meat helps keep the curing safe and even.
“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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