The Manner of Curing Wiltshire Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Sprinkle each flitch of bacon with coarse sea salt and let the blood drain for 24 hours.
Cure
Mix 1½ cups of coarse sugar, 1½ cups of coarse sea salt, ¼ cup of saltpetre, and 1 pound of common salt.
Rub the mixture well onto the bacon, turning it every day for a month.
Dry and smoke
Hang the bacon to dry, then smoke it for 10 days.
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 out moisture and blood from the meat, firming it and helping preserve it.
- Common salt
- Draws out moisture and preserves the bacon by slowing spoilage-causing microbes.
- Coarse sugar
- Balances the harshness of the salt and adds a mild sweetness to the finished bacon.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and keep its pink colour during curing.
The step that matters
Rubbing and turning the cure. The salt and saltpetre must reach every part of the meat to preserve it evenly. Rubbing the mixture well and turning the bacon daily spreads the cure through the flitch, so no area is left under-salted and at risk of spoiling.
“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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