So, I wanted to try and make my own bacon for the first time, so I used the bacon video from Josh Weissman.
He makes big batches of cure, so I decided to divide it in half
200 grams of Morton Kosher Salt.
100 grams of sugar
And 30 grams of Pink curing salt.
However, he says 60 grams, or 6 teaspoons worth. But with a convergent calculator, it shows that 30 grams equals 6 teaspoons. Is that too much pink salt for my cure?
For contact, my meant is three pork bellies, two are from sakes club and are about 5.45 and 5.65 pounds each, and the last one is about 2 1/2 pounds. I did the 2.5% cure like in the video.
Sorry for such a Beginner question. Just paranoid that I’m not doing this right.
by gytech
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Let me get this straight, you mixed up a batch of salt plus sugar and curing salts then cured bellies at 2.5% of your mixture, correct? So your 200/100/30 salt sugar PP1 ratio contained 1/11th curing salts (30/330).
The nitrite concentration of your mixture would then be 0.568% nitrite (1/11th of 6.25% which is the nitrite concentration of PP1). So your 2.5% cure would have a nitrite concentration of 0.025×0.00568=0.000142 which is 142ppm nitrite. The safety threshold is 200 ppm so you’re good to go.
The typical convention is to use 0.25% curing salt for 156ppm nitrite, since you used 1/11th of 2.5% then you used less than usual.
Looking at my last batch of bacon, a slab of meat that weighed 4911 grams got 14.73 grams of PP#1, which is 0.3% by weight.
Overall, I’m sure it’s fine, you could maybe do a shorter cure? But someone who knows better can maybe answer that.
Not much else really to say other than this is why I don’t like batch cure recipes. For me, all ingredients have a % weight based on meat weight and then I mix all ingredients.
Rule of thumb 1tsp pink salt for 5lbs of meat, I use the % depending on weight of meat
Here is a pretty good recipe for bacon with a eq curing calculator [here](https://amazingribs.com/tested-recipes/pork-recipes/how-make-smoked-bacon-home/#recipe)
Friend, everything, everytime, gets into a spreadsheet converted to grams and all salts and aromatics finitely calculated based on actual production weight.
It’s the better way!
I recommend http://www.amazingribs.com where there’s a calculator for this stuff