Curing

What curing does

Three things at once, which is why it is more than salting.

It removes available water, by osmosis, exactly as salting does. As the cure draws liquid out and the meat dries, water activity falls until spoilage organisms cannot grow.

It changes the texture and the flavour. Salt denatures muscle proteins, so cured meat is firmer and denser. Over weeks and months the meat's own enzymes break proteins and fats down into savoury and aromatic compounds, which is where the character of a good ham comes from. This is why aged cured meat tastes of so much more than salty pork.

In many cures, it uses nitrite to do a specific job that salt alone does not do — which is the part worth understanding properly.

What curing salts are, and why they matter

Curing salts — sold as Prague powder, pink curing salt, or under similar names — are ordinary salt with a small proportion of sodium nitrite, sometimes with nitrate as well. They are dyed pink so they cannot be confused with table salt, because the quantities involved are small and the consequences of confusing them are not.

Nitrite does several things. It contributes the characteristic cured flavour, and the pink colour of ham and bacon — cured meat stays pink when cooked because nitrite has reacted with the myoglobin. It slows the fats going rancid. And, critically, **it inhibits *Clostridium botulinum***, the organism responsible for botulism, which grows without oxygen in exactly the low-oxygen environment inside a curing muscle or a stuffed sausage.

That last point is why nitrite is in a great many cure recipes and why leaving it out of one that specifies it is not a health improvement but a change to the safety basis of the recipe. It is also why the quantity is fixed rather than adjustable, and why curing salts and table salt are never interchangeable in either direction.

FoodHQ does not publish curing quantities, cure times or drying schedules. FoodHQ does not publish salt percentages, acidity figures, processing times, curing quantities or keeping windows. Those are safety numbers set by a food safety authority rather than by a cookery writer. In the UK the Food Standards Agency is the authority — take the figures from them or from a body of equivalent standing, and use this page to understand what those figures are doing.

The kinds of cure

Dry cure

Salt and seasonings rubbed on and left, with liquid drawn out and drained away. Bacon, pancetta, bresaola, prosciutto. Firmest and most concentrated.

Wet cure or brine cure

Submerged in salt solution. Faster and more even, gives a juicier result. Most commercial bacon and gammon.

Injected cure

Brine injected into the muscle for speed. Industrial, and why cheap bacon releases so much white liquid in the pan.

Equilibrium curing

Cure calculated as a percentage of the meat's weight and sealed with it, so the salt distributes evenly and cannot over-salt. Popular with careful home curers and much more predictable than time-based dry curing.

Fresh cure — gravlax

Salt and sugar on raw fish for a day or two, refrigerated, eaten without drying. A short cure and not a shelf-stable preserve.

What curing is doing in some familiar foods

• Bacon — pork belly or loin, cured with salt and nitrite, sometimes smoked. Still raw; cooking is required.
• Prosciutto and serrano — whole legs, dry-cured and air-dried for a year or more. Safe to eat uncooked because water activity has fallen far enough over that time.
• Salami — cured, fermented and dried. Both an acid drop and a water drop are doing preserving work, which is why salami sits across two sections of this site.
• Gravlax — salmon cured briefly in salt, sugar and dill. Refrigerated, eaten within days, not a preserve.
• Biltong and jerky — cured then dried, with the drying doing most of the final work.
• Salt beef and corned beef — brine-cured, then cooked. The cure is for flavour, colour and keeping before the cooking, not instead of it.
• Confit — salted first, then cooked slowly in fat and stored under it. The salt is the preservative; the fat is a seal.

Common questions