Why it works: Sugar and pork 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 ↓
Ten-day Plan for Sugar Curing Pork
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cure
Mix the salt and sugar together in a bowl.
Cure the meat
Rub the meat thoroughly with the salt and sugar mixture on the day it is killed.
Repeat the rubbing process after three days.
Repeat the rubbing process again after another three days.
Finish
At the end of ten days, hang the meat to smoke.
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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Sugar + porktop 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
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and preserves it while the cure penetrates slowly.
- Granulated sugar
- Balances the sharpness of the salt and adds sweetness to the cured flavour.
- Pork
- The meat being cured; salt and sugar gradually penetrate its surface over the curing period.
The step that matters
Rubbing the meat thoroughly. Salt penetrates meat slowly, mainly by diffusing inward from the surface. If the cure is unevenly rubbed or the repeat rubs are skipped, some areas get too little salt and are more open to spoilage, while others become 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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