I started two last month; I’ll smoke one and leave one unsmoked as my wife, Pauline, is not too keen on smoked food.

We’ll use it sliced in place of ham and it may even find its way into the odd bacon butty as it’s a loin version of US bacon! I’ll not be stopping making real British bacon any time soon though – have no fears about that!

The ingredients for 1 kg of pork are:

16gm Salt (I used sea salt)
10gm White sugar
2.4gm Cure #1
0.3gm Crushed juniper berries
0.3gm Crushed bay leaves
0.3gm Crushed coriander seeds

Use the cure pro-rata for other weights of meat or use the calculator at the bottom of this page.

The process is simplicity itself:

Weigh the ingredients and mix them together.

Apply 90% of the cure mix to the meat and 10% to the fat.

Rub the cure in.

Either vac-pac the meat or place it into food grade plastic bags/cling film/food wrap/saran wrap.

Place it in the fridge for 14 days giving it a rub occasionally through the wrapping.

Rinse it and place it back in the fridge to dry uncovered for a day.

Either hot smoke it – start it at 40 – 50°C until it is nicely dry then raise the temperature and apply smoke. Gradually increase the temperature of the smoker to around 80°C and cook the meat until it has an internal temperature of 70°C. Hold it at this temperature for at least 2 minutes.

Cool and refrigerate before slicing.

You could also cook it without smoke or even cold smoke it. I like it hot smoked with maple or alder though.

It could, of course, be smoked at higher temperatures; my preference is for a longer slower cook as I think that this makes for a moister product.

It is designed for the experienced curer – those who will know to adjust the meat weight for any bone. Those who realise that meat takes a very long time to reach equilibrium in an eq brine.

They will also be aware of curing safely and using a sufficiently strong brine to protect the meat whilst it is curing when using a brine cure.

The input to the form is in grams rather than lb and oz. This is for purely practical purposes; for example, 2.5% of 1000gm is far easier to calculate than 2.5% of 2lbs2oz. It also uses weight for all measurements; this is because the volumes of solids are variable.

As many people cure using a brine weight that’s half the weight of the meat, the calculator asks the total brine weight that you require and then calculates the ingredients for that amount of brine.

To convert US measures to grams you can use our:

US measures to grams converter

See also:
Preparing the dry-cured corned beef and curing the meat
The dry-cured corned beef after curing

I decided to follow my friend Paul’s instructions for cooking the corned beef. He said to braise it slowly in chicken stock; I hadn’t any defrosted and so used water with the meat sat on a sliced onion.

I tasted the liquid after about 30 minutes of cooking at 140°C to see if it was salty. I would have changed the water had it have been but in this case, it wasn’t. The meat took about 4½ hours to be tender when probed. Its internal temperature was way up to 100°C at this stage.

I left it in the liquid for a good half-hour to rest; it was covered during this time.

It was very nice. It’s not a strongly spiced as I thought it may be nor is it as salty as I feared it may be, both good things. We ate it with the Irish potato and cabbage dish called colcannon and some boiled carrots. If it’s as good cold as it is hot, it will be a regular.

The recipe is:

To every 1kg of brisket or silverside of beef use:

22gm salt
15gm Soft brown sugar
2.4gm Cure #1
0.18gm Saltpetre (Optional)
1.2gm Black pepper
1gm Coriander seeds
1gm Mustard seeds
6 Juniper berries
2 Bay leaves
2 Allspice berries
1 Clove

Cure #2 can replace Cure #1 and Saltpetre – use the same amount as you would have used of Cure #1.

To make Paul’s original recipe use 4 juniper berries (instead of 6) and 4 Allspice berries (Instead of 2) per kilogram of meat. All the other ingredients remain the same.

Crush the spices in a pestle and mortar or similar. Mix the cure ingredients together well and then rub them into the meat. Vacuum pack under light pressure or seal in a food grade bag for 20 days.

Rinse and then cook by braising it slowly as above.

To make things easier here’s a cure calculator:

For those that don’t know, Bresaola is an air-dried beef that originates in the north of Italy. In the past, I’ve always made it using Jason Molinari’s recipe from curedmeats.blogspot.co.uk. The recipe below, whilst very different from Jason’s, owes its heritage to his. I’ve removed the cinnamon and clove, reduced the other spices and added a small amount of garlic.

The best of the Italian versions, Bresaola della Valtellina, uses meat from the leg: the cuts we know as topside, silverside and top rump (thick flank). In the US ‘Eye of round’ would be a good choice. It’s best with a piece of meat from one muscle to avoid connective tissue – I used Silverside for mine.

Weigh the meat and use the following percentages of the meat’s weight for the other ingredients:

Salt 2.8%
Sugar 0.5%
Cure #2 – 0.24%
Black Pepper 0.4%
Dried Garlic 0.2%
Dried Thyme 0.05%
Crushed Juniper Berries 0.05%
Dried Rosemary (I used home-dried) 0.025%
If you want to use cure #1 and saltpetre instead of cure #2, use the same amount of cure #1 as you would have used cure #2 and add 0.017% saltpetre

To make the bresaola, start by trimming the meat of all fat and ‘silverskin’, the white and silvery coloured connective tissue found on some meat.

When it has been trimmed, weigh it, make a note of the weight and use the calculator (below) to work out the weights of the other ingredients. Then measure them out and mix them together thoroughly.

Rub the ingredients into the meat well, then either put it into ‘cling film’ and wrap it up well, or put it into a food-grade plastic bag and wrap it tightly, or seal it in a vac-bag, removing the air so that the bag’s in full contact with the meat, but not under vacuum. Put it into the fridge for 30 days, rubbing it occasionally through the bag.

Image from a previous project

After 30 days, rinse the meat in cold water, then dry it with a paper towel, weigh it and make a note of the weight. Then put it into the fridge for a day for the surface to dry.

At the same time as you do this, if you’re in the UK or other place where commercial mould culture is not readily available, you may want to make your own culture for the mould on the outside of the meat. Either, scrape some white mould from a commercial salami or from one of your own, and add a pinch of sugar and a couple of tablespoons of bottled water or any other drinkable water without chlorine or preservatives. Cover it, and leave it at room temperature.

The bresaola will be dried in a casing. I used a Collagen one, but you may prefer to use an ox bung or beef cap casing as collagens are quite difficult to get in small quantities. If so, you could put a piece of it that’s enough to cover the bresaola in to soak in cold water at this stage.

The following day, if you are using a collagen casing, prepare it according to the supplier’s instructions – in this case, 1 hour in a 10% brine. Then dry any surplus water off the casing using a paper towel and put the meat into the casing and tie it with string tightly.

Images from a previous project

If there are any air bubbles, prick them with a needle that’s been sterilised by holding it briefly in a flame. Weigh the meat and make a note of the weight. Then brush/rub it all over with the ‘mould liquid’ that we made earlier, or with a commercial mould culture, such as Mold 600 (US website) prepared according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Hang the bresaola in your drying fridge or another place where a temperature between 10°C (50°f) and 15.6°C (approx 60°f) and a relative humidity (RH) between 75% and 85% can be maintained. I put mine in a fridge that has been converted to maintain the temperature and humidity that I want. I find that I have less problems when I run it around 12°C with a RH around 75% – 80%. In the early stages, the RH may be in the 90’s; this is perfectly normal when using a small curing chamber and somewhat desirable; we want the RH in the curing chamber to lower gradually as the meat dries.

The meat will develop a coat of dry white mould, don’t be alarmed if initially a slightly fuzzy mould forms as this often precedes the dry one we want. However, fuzzy mould that lingers, or any mould that isn’t white isn’t wanted – but you shouldn’t have that problem if you’ve used the mould culture above. Here’s the bresaola 3½ weeks into drying, it’s covered with a good white mould that’s keeping all the nasty ones at bay. It’s lost about 28% of its post-cure weight:

I continued to dry it for 48 days until it had lost just over 40% of its post-cure weight. It doesn’t look much after de-casing:

But sliced is another matter altogether:

There is a calculator for this bresaola:

Bresaola Calculator

This Lomo is made from the solid muscle that forms the eye of a pork loin. It starts by cutting the ‘eye’ from a loin of pork:

It was dry-cured in a vacuum bag with Spanish smoked paprika, black pepper and garlic for a couple of weeks:

The cured Lomo was rinsed and then dried overnight in the fridge…

…before being cased in a large collagen casing and tied:

It was dried at a temperature around 12 – 15°C with the humidity starting around 85% and dropping to 75% during the later stages of drying.

The resulting product is one of my wife’s favourites:

The recipe’s a simple dry cure:

Lomo embuchado
For 1kg of pork or pro-rata
Salt 25gm
Demerara Sugar 2.5gm
Saltpetre 0.17gm
Cure #1 – 2.4gm
Ground Black Pepper 7.5gm
Spanish Smoked Paprika 7.5gm
Large fresh garlic clove 1

Many will choose to use Cure #2 in place of the Cure #1/Saltpetre combination – in which case use 2.4gm per kg of meat.

To simplify matters, there’s a calculator for the ingredients here:

Lomo Embuchado Calculator

What springs to mind if I mention Emmet? Is it a Cornish tourist, or maybe the neighbour of Hyacinth Bouquet in the famous sitcom? Well, to any foodie or meat curer it won’t be either; it’ll be the makers of the famous Suffolk Black Ham that used to hold Royal Warrant, Emmett’s of Peasenhall. They’ve been making ham for over 150 years. Whilst there are other black hams, including the famous Bradenham from Wiltshire, Shropshire Black Ham, and a less well-known one from Derbyshire, Emmett’s seems to have become the one people talk about. It’s featured in the press and used to be rolled out on Delia Smith’s TV programmes at Christmas.

Now, before anyone else does, I’d like to point out that I’m not trying to produce a clone of Emmett’s ham and will not be using their method as far as I can ascertain. My cure will produce a ham ‘in the spirit’ of a traditional Suffolk Black Ham using a simplified curing process.

The ham gets its colour from Muscodavo sugar, Molasses and Dark Porter or Stout. In Emmet’s case, it’s from Nethergate brewery’s Old Growler – a 5% ABV porter. I have a friend in the same city as the Nethergate brewery so I made the ham with it. Another porter or stout could be substituted – I was told by the owner of Emmetts that they used to use Guinness.

Black Ham

Beer (Porter or Stout) 601gm
Water 145gm
Salt 100 gm
Molasses (Muscodavo) sugar 45gm
Molasses 100gm
Cure #2 gm 9.4gm

Whole Spices
Black 6 Peppercorns
Coriander 6 Seeds
Juniper 4 Berries
Cloves 2 Cloves

All the ingredients with the exception of the cure are placed into a pan and brought to a rolling boil for 2 – 3 minutes. They are then allowed to cool. The cure is added and mixed well in to ensure that it’s fully dissolved. It’s then ready for use.

Important: This recipe must be used in a ratio of 2 parts meat to 1 part brine. The cure above is for meat weighing 2kg. For all other weights of meat please use the calculator below. The meat should be cured for 10 days per kilo or pro-rata. This cure is not recommended for meat above 3.5kg in weight, without adaption.

After 10 days per kg (pro-rata) curing the ham is rinsed in cold water and put in the fridge to wait for the surface to dry out before it is smoked.

The Black Ham’s was smoked. I was going to smoke it for 72 hours, but a rethink, because of its size and the weather, has meant that it was been in oak smoke for a total of about 28 hours.

I’ll give it a few days in the fridge, loosely wrapped, to dry further and to allow the cure to fully equalise. That is, to allow the cure to spread evenly throughout the meat.

I cooked the ham simply in my slow cooker in plain water at 80°C – the ‘keep warm’ setting on my cooker once it has come up to temperature. I changed the water after about 30 minutes to avoid it being salty, although with hindsight this wasn’t necessary.

The ham was cooked until it reached an internal temperature of 72°C and then glazed with a mixture of brown sugar, French mustard and apricot jam and put into a hot oven for about 20 minutes.

So what of the end result? Well, I was amazed by the weight loss, particularly given the small amount of skin that needed removing. The total loss was some 45% and amazingly, it actually lost weight during the brining, somewhat unusual to say the least.

The meat is drier than my normal hams, something that it has in common with the Emmetts Ham that was the starting point of this recipe. The meat is also very firm, probably due to the combined length of the smoking and drying period for what is a small piece of meat. I doubt that a larger piece of meat, even matured for a longer period of time, would have the same problem.

What of the taste? Well, the glaze I used does absolutely nothing for it! The smoking is virtually undetectable, next time I’d either smoke it for a lot longer or not bother at all. The outer crust of the meat, where it was unprotected by fat has very much a molasses taste with a hint of the beer, so it’s obviously better done (as Emmetts do) with whole legs. That said, the rest of the meat is very nice, neither too salty nor too sweet, neither too spicy nor too bland.

The family’s verdict was mixed; Mum loved it, she’s a real lover of drier styles of ham with good flavour; Dad was a bit non-committal but came back for another slice, but Emma my daughter didn’t like it at all.

What about next time? I’ll be happy enough to stick with the same basic recipe; maybe I’ll tinker with the molasses a little or replace the raw cane sugar with white granulated, or even up the spicing – maybe 10 – 20% more – I don’t know. But, fundamentally the recipe seems sound. What I do know is that I’ll use a larger piece of meat of better quality than the cheap supermarket product I used for this – one with a good covering of fat and skin. I know I’d either smoke them for longer or in heavier smoke or not at all; I’m not sure that it really needs the additional smoke flavour. All-in-all, given that this type of ham is not really my ‘cup of tea’ (I’ve made it ‘cos mum loves this type) I’m pleased with the results.

There is a calculator for this ham:

Black Ham Calculator

Contrary to popular belief, the reason’s not that I’m tight-fisted! There are also some technical reasons why it’s a good idea. They’re not related to injection-curing; it’s the immersion part of the cure that’s the potential cause for concern.

Now, let’s be right about this, meat’s been cured using injection followed by immersion – ‘pump and dunk’ – with no (apparent) problems for quite a time. And, before 2008, it wasn’t a problem because the EU set the maximum residual level of nitrite allowed in the meat, and that could be determined by testing.

In 2008, this changed; the laws were tightened and the level of cure permitted was not only reduced but was changed from being based on the residual level to being based on the ‘ingoing amount’ of cure instead.

That’s fine in the case of a dry cure, where you know by weight how much the ingoing amount is. And, with an injection cure, you know exactly what you’ve injected. But what about immersion curing? How much will the meat ‘suck up’ from the brine?

We were under the impression that we also knew that; it was assumed to be about 8% – 10% of the meat’s weight, in the same ratio as the ingredients in the brine cure.

Then we became aware of the US Food Safety and Inspection Service’s “Processing Inspectors’ Calculations Handbook”, which tells how to make the necessary calculations. It specifies two methods for calculating immersion brines: one for small pieces of meat and one for larger ones. Should we apply one of these to the immersion part of our procedure? If so, which one? Not a problem, you’d think, as the handbook gives instructions as to which one to use; but in reality, it is. You see, tests carried out by a US analytical scientist who’s also a hobby curer, show that for pieces of meat of the size most commonly cured at home, the specified rule doesn’t seem to work. His tests showed, that contrary to what the FSIS advise, the other rule applies.

The test results, from his piece of meat, indicate that the meat absorbs the ingredients from the brine very quickly, and in a way that is closest to FSIS method 2. This method states that the meat will try to become part of one system with the brine cure; it will become ‘in equilibrium’. The method of calculation is such that the more brine cure there is, the higher the amount of ingredients absorbed. It sounds daft, but they mean it! What they’re saying is, that if you take two identical 1kg pieces of meat, and put one into 2 litres of brine cure, and one into 5 litres, then the one that’s in 5 litres will absorb more of the salt, sugar and curing salt.

So how does this affect the meat when it’s been injected? Well, with the amounts of brine cure that I use in my recipes, once injected, it’s my belief that there’s little or no further pick-up from the short spell of time that it’s in the brine cure. Looking at the details for a piece of ham I cured in 2008, had the FSIS method of calculation been used for the cure, the meat should have had 5% salt in it from the immersion part of the cure; that’s double or triple the amount in average cooked ham from the supermarket. In fact, in side-by-side blind tests, my ham is less salty than theirs. I would stress, that of all the hundreds of hams that must have been made using my recipe, not one person has complained that it’s inedibly salty. Mark my words, if it was 5% salt, they would have.

So, if that’s the case, why am I bothering with all this? Well, firstly, there’s a remote possibility that I’m wrong; secondly, I tend to cure larger pieces of meat, around 4 – 5kg; I know many of you use smaller pieces of meat that may react more quickly in the brine cure; thirdly, you can never be too safe.

The FSIS do give advice about what to do when you use two methods of curing on one piece of meat. They say to calculate each part of the curing process separately. Because of what I’ve said above and for other reasons, I’m not happy that their advice is correct; by the very nature of the equilibrium method, the injected amount of brine cure must form part of the calculation for the equilibrium part of the cure. You can’t count it twice. So, which is it to be?

With that in mind, I’ve devised a cure that complies with both the injection curing calculations, and with those for immersion curing (had the brine cure not been injected). I have used FSIS method 2 to calculate it as an immersion cure. As far as I am aware, neither the EU nor the UK governments’ publish instructions or advice on how to calculate that ingoing levels of nitrite and nitrates comply with their laws.

The cure calculator is not in the same style as the rest of this site due to scripting issues:

Pauline’s Ham Calculator

It’s unusual as it’s flavoured with orange zest and fennel – not the traditional flavours you expect in pancetta.

The meat was dry-cured for 12 days, rolled and tied, and has been hanging in my air-drying fridge for 27 days.

Allowing for the removal of the skin when it was rolled, it’s lost 22% of its original weight – in supermarket terms it’s been made with 127gms of meat per 100gms pancetta.

Here’s Laurence’s recipe:

Rub a 3-pound piece of pork belly with

6 grams pink salt
25 grams kosher salt
12 grams turbinado sugar
10 grams coarsely ground black pepper
5 grams fennel, crushed
2 grams ground cloves
grated zest of two oranges

Put it in a plastic bag (like a Ziploc) and refrigerate it for 7 days. Every couple days, rub the belly to redistribute the seasoning (you can do this right through the bag). When the belly feels firm to the touch, it’s cured. Then rinse off the cure ingredients, towel dry, and rub the inside of the belly with a second dose of pepper, fennel, clove, and oranges. Roll it up tightly (fat side outside) and tie it up. Soak for a few minutes in balsamic vinegar (I use the inexpensive, commercial brand Antica Italia), then hang to dry where the temperature is between 50 and 60, and the humidity is about 60%. Every week, take it down and soak it in the balsamic vinegar again for a few minutes. (I keep the vinegar in a bag for this.) When the pancetta is firm but still pliable, after 2-3 weeks, it’s ready to enjoy.

It’ll be great as antipasti.

To make the calculations easy, you can use this online calculator:

This Pancetta cuts right back on the spices letting the meat shine through.

If you make it, try to get a very thick piece of belly pork from the butcher; the one I used wasn’t really thick enough because the shrinkage is quite considerable. It looks thicker in the photo than it actually is. What looks like green/black mould is actually beneficial white mould on top of the powdered black pepper that I used because I was too lazy to grind the coarse black pepper that I included in the recipe!

Trim the belly well before curing – whether you remove the skin at this stage, or after drying, is up to you. Remove the flap where the ribs have been and any pieces of meat that are between the ribs, you’ll only end up throwing them away after drying. In fact, it’s best to have the bones taken out as a sheet you’ll then be able to use the trim in sausage or pork pies and save wastage.

…and so to the recipe:

Pancetta di Thurlaston

Weigh the Pork Belly and mix the following percentages of its weight:

Salt 2.4%
Muscodavo Sugar 0.6%
Cure #2 0.24%
Ground Black Pepper 0.24%
White Pepper 0.07%
Crushed Juniper Berries 0.07%
Dry Thyme 0.07%
Garlic Powder 0.07%

Mix the cure ingredients together and rub it into all of the pork belly. Use about 85% on the meat side and 15% on the fat/skin. Put the meat into a food-grade plastic bag and put it into the fridge to cure. Turn the meat over every couple of days and give it a rub through the bag.

After 7 days, rinse (not soak) the meat and dry it off. Mix 1 tbsp roughly ground black pepper and 3 crushed dried chilli’s together and rub this onto the meat side of the pancetta.

Ideally, hang it at a temperature of 12 – 15°C with a relative humidity of about 75% for a minimum of 2 weeks, or until it’s lost about 30% of its weight. If this isn’t possible it will probably be OK in the fridge, but the lower humidity may cause it to dry too quickly. If this appears to be the case you may need to wrap it loosely in something like baking parchment or greaseproof paper.

There’s also no reason why this cannot be used as fresh bacon after just a few days of drying. In this case use 0.24% of Cure #1 instead of Cure #2.

To make the calculations easy, you can use this online calculator:

For curing, I wanted a side from a much larger pig, a ‘baconer’; a side of this will weigh between 80-100lbs. I got one from Don Hutton at Warwick Bridge Farm, Littlethorpe weighing 93lbs which has given me 75lbs of usable meat (60lbs excluding hocks, trotters, liver, heart and cheek). By the time it’s converted into ham, bacon, sausage, faggots etc I’ll have about 70lbs of edible products. This photo of a piece of loin being dry-cured for back bacon shows the size of it.

Pancetta

I’ve made all the usual things like bacon, ham and sausage and decided that my first venture into air drying meat would be pancetta. This Italian streaky bacon is made by dry curing bacon with a load of spices added to the cure, and then hanging it up to dry for a month or so – apart from the spices, that’s how we made bacon a few years ago!

Firstly, take a nice chunk of belly pork:

Make up the following cure:

Weigh the meat and mix the following percentages of its weight.
Salt 2.4%
Black Pepper 1.9%
Brown Sugar 1.1%
Cure #2 – 0.24%
Juniper 0.43%
Bay Leaves 0.07%
Nutmeg 0.19%
Dry Thyme 0.12%
Garlic 2 cloves per kg

You can buy cure #2 from Weschenfelders. You will need scales accurate to at least a tenth of a gram to weigh it. These can be bought cheaply on ebay for about £10.

To help with the calculations there’s a calculator for this pancetta here:

Rub about 10% of the mix onto the skin side of the meat…

and the rest into the flesh…

Rub it into all the ‘nooks and crannies’ (that’s ‘nooks and crannies’ Not ‘crooks and nannies’!) and then stuff the lot into a plastic food grade bag and put it into the fridge for a week or so. Turn it over every day or two.

It’ll be interesting to see how this comes out as this cure recipe from the Cured Meats blog has one of the highest levels of spices and herbs that I have seen in a pancetta cure.

The Pancetta was left to cure for a week in the fridge at a temperature below 8°C .

It was then rinsed briefly in cold water, dried off and coated with a light dusting of black pepper, bay leaves and a little dried red chilli.

It was then hung at 12-15°C with a relative humidity of around 70% until it had lost 30% of its weight. This took about a month.

It turned out really well. This is the proper job – not the stuff you get at the supermarket, that’s basically streaky bacon with an inflated price tag and under 10% weight loss. For eating raw I would have dried mine even more.

I sliced some of it thinly for wrapping around chicken etc, and done some in larger pieces for flavouring casseroles and the like.

Needless to say, I forgot to take pictures so this one of it in a vac-pac will have to do. It would, of course, keep perfectly well in the piece in the fridge, I just find it easier to slice it all at once.

Pancetta is a brilliant way to start curing meat at home and could be made successfully in a domestic fridge. The results are certainly worth the effort.