Curing meat is something Id like to try for quite a while now. I finally decided to give it a go and I’m looking forward to the results and lessons learned. This post is more or less a journal of what I did and what it ended up being.

Basics

Curing meat requires basically two steps. Infusing the meat with salt and drying it afterward. For the infusion you usually use 3% and 4% salt (calculated from the raw meats weight).

During this process you must ensure that there is no air contact. You can do so by vacuum packaging the salted meat (equilibrium curing). The duration of this process depends on the size of the meat to cure.

After curing you string the meat up and let it hang in a cool environment. The meat is done once it lost 30-35% of its weight.

First try

For my first try I used pork tenderloin. I cut it up into 90-110g pieces, just to reduce the time it will take to get the first results in. Once I know the process Id rather use bigger pieces.

To begin I used 4% salt for all pieces. For some I added pepper and thyme for flavor. Once the salt was distributed well on all surfaces I vacuumed the pieces.

Note: careful when vacuuming the meat. If possible do this in manual mode so you can stop before liquid reaches the machine.

Once packaged I let it rest in the fridge for 4 days. After unpacking I cut off a piece and fried it in the pan. The salt level was a bit too high on that one (this one had about 4,5% salt) but Id rather be safe than sorry with the first batch.

After weighting each piece of meat I calculated 65% of its weight, wrote that number down on a piece of paper and attached it to the string. This way it is easy to check if a piece has reached its wanted weight without thinking too much.

Stringing the meat up and hanging it in the fridge can both be improved for sure, but again for the first time this process has to do.

After one week the average weight loss was already half way there (down from 100 to 76 percent).

After 13 days all pieces did reach the calculated weight.

In general I am super happy with the result. The taste was pretty good (especially with thyme) and the consistency was superb. The meat was tender, super tender. I did not expect such amazing consistency.

Two pieces I kept in the fridge, the other pieces I froze to not let them dry further. We used to get batches of smoked meat once a year from a farmer and freezing did work very well there. I’m sure it will work great with my own batch as well.

Next Time..

Taste wise there are so many things I want to try with future batches:

• different cuts and types of meat
• bigger meat sizes (500g per piece would be super nice)
• using normal and smoked salt in combination to get a fake smoked flavor
• spices (coriander, chili, smoked paprika,…)