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 the cure
Finely pound the saltpetre, salt-prunella, common salt, and brown sugar.
Mix the ingredients well and rub the mixture onto the pork.
Pack and weigh
Place the pork tightly in a deep tub, filling any cavities with common salt.
Cover the pork with a lid that fits inside the tub and weigh it down with heavy weights.
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 is salted, cured and preserved by the mixture.
- Saltpetre
- Helps the cured pork keep its pink colour and inhibits spoilage bacteria.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt in the cure.
- Salt-prunella
- Acts as an additional curing salt that adds to the preserving action of the cure.
The step that matters
Rubbing the cure evenly onto the pork. Salt and cure draw moisture out and act only where they touch the meat. Uneven coverage leaves patches that spoil, so the mixture must be worked into every surface and cavity before packing.
“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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