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 ↓
Pickled Pork
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pork
Sprinkle the pork well with salt and let it drain for 24 hours.
Make and apply the cure
Finely pound the saltpetre, salt-prunella, common salt, and brown sugar, then mix well.
Rub the mixture onto the pork and place it tightly in a deep tub.
Fill any cavities with common salt and cover the pork well.
Weigh and store
Place a cover inside the tub and weigh it down to keep the pork submerged in the pickle.
If air is excluded, the pork will keep for over a year.
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
- Pork
- The main meat that the cure penetrates and preserves.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives cured pork its characteristic pink colour.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.
The step that matters
Keeping the pork submerged under the pickle. Any part of the meat left exposed to air can spoil or dry out, so the cover must be weighed down to keep the pork fully covered by the cure.
“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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