To Cure English Bacon
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the meat
Dress and cool the hog, then cut it into proper pieces.
Mix the salt, saltpetre, and sugar together.
Rub the mixture thoroughly over each piece of meat.
Place the pieces in a tight tub or suitable cask.
Cure and smoke
Baste the meat with the brine that forms from its juices, two to three times a week, turning each piece each time.
For smoking, use black birch chips or hickory for flavor.
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 seasons it, helping preserve the flesh during curing.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives cured bacon its characteristic pink color.
- Sugar
- Balances the saltiness and adds sweetness to the cured flavor.
- Hog
- The main meat that is cured; its fat and lean portions become the bacon.
The step that matters
Rubbing the cure thoroughly over each piece. Salt and saltpetre only preserve the meat where they contact it. Uneven rubbing leaves untreated areas that can spoil, so every surface needs an even coating.
“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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