All confused over mixes.

Air dried cured meat and salami recipes

Postby spanner » Tue May 25, 2010 9:57 pm

wheels wrote:Rather than be prescriptive here are the details so you can make your own decision about how to progress:

The cure will give you around 60 PPM Nitrite, 210 PPM Nitrate (from saltpetre), 2% Salt and 1% Sugar with 530 PPM Ascorbate. As such the curing salt is having little effect on it's own - the curing will be done by the saltpetre so a longer cure may be needed. The level of saltpetre is technically above the strictest of the EU regs. (figures have been rounded)

I'm guessing that the snot will be around 1 PPM which I doubt will give any long term protection to the bacon!

HTH

Phil


Cheers Phil.

The snot should at least felicitate bag lubrication.

I can get potassium nitrate locally but that doesn't help.

Any suggestions how I can improve?

(I may be back to the UK in a couple of months so Franco's shop is looking favourable)
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Postby grisell » Tue May 25, 2010 11:05 pm

Add 2-5 % of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to the 'Praganda' mix and I think that will be just fine. Most private households cure with only saltpetre and no nitrite and it will be just fine. I had done this for 20 years before I could lay my hands on professional nitrite salt.
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Postby wheels » Tue May 25, 2010 11:18 pm

spanner wrote:Any suggestions how I can improve?


Some ideas:

I'm surprised that a 0.6% nitrite European cure isn't available where you are - this would help?

If you use a premixed bulk cure, I'd ensure that you have accurate scales and, if it was me, I would grind the lot together in (say) a food processor to try and get a standard size of crystals within it. This will help avoid problems with settlement. In any case, mix very well before use.

I may be worth trying to find out the levels of cure in your Austrian mix to see whether this would be easier to use as whilst you ruled it out because of nitrate you have actually ended up with a nitrate cure.

Other than that, i don't think that you could do more in your situation with what you have.

I would stress the need for accurate scales with 100% Nitrate - irrespective of where you are, you can generally get scales accurate to 0.1 gm on-line. These, as far as I'm concerned, are essential for the amounts that we use.

HTH

Phil
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Postby spanner » Wed May 26, 2010 9:33 am

I found some cure with 0.6% nitrite and have ordered some. Hopefully it should arrive by donkey sometime next week...

The nitrate I have has been weighed into 2g bags by my local pharmacist so no issues with quantities added to cure mix.

:D

It came already! (0.5~0.6% nitrite)

So if my calculations are correct I should use 10 times more than Cure#1 in Oddleys recipe which means I use no salt but 184g of this 'local' preparation.

Thanks for you help everyone

:D
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Postby Ianinfrance » Tue Jun 01, 2010 10:11 pm

spanner wrote:So if my calculations are correct I should use 10 times more than Cure#1 in Oddleys recipe which means I use no salt but 184g of this 'local' preparation.

Thanks for you help everyone

:D
It's my experience (strictly limited, admittedly) that European ntrited salt is designed to be used as a straight replacement for 100% of the salt in any preparation which needs to be cured, but not fermented.

So if a recipe calls for 184 g of salt but you wanted to make it safer by curing it, then you would use 184 g of European nitrited salt. If A recipe called for 180 g of pure salt and 16 g of cure #1 then I'd be inclined to use 200 g of European nitrited salt.

Hope that helps.
All the best - Ian
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Postby grisell » Wed Jun 02, 2010 12:17 am

Seems right. Substitute the salt with the nitrite salt.
André

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Postby wheels » Wed Jun 02, 2010 12:19 pm

In the case of Oddley's cure on the previous page, direct substitution with a 0.6% Nitrite will give minimal protection to the meat at just over 120 PPM Nitrite. That's the minimum recommended for curing in the US regs.

25gm per kg of 0.6% cure will give 150 PPM which should be ideal. A good base cure would be 25gm of 0.6% nitrite cure, 12.5gm sugar, 0.5gm Ascorbate (if using) per kg of meat or pro rata.

HTH

Phil
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Postby grisell » Thu Jun 03, 2010 10:26 am

Does it matter if you use sodium ascorbate or pure ascorbic acid (C-vitamin)?
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Postby wheels » Thu Jun 03, 2010 12:06 pm

The US rules are for ascorbate or erythorbate in bacon. However, ascorbic acid is used in the UK. Do a forum search on it - I know that Oddley calculated the PPM required for ascorbic acid based on the respective atomic weights (it's different).

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Postby spanner » Thu Jun 10, 2010 9:52 am

Success :D

Using the mixture in the recipe previously mentioned the bacon (back and streaky) was perfect.

The only problem I had was when I mixed everything in a food processor, a lot of the nitrate and ascorbic acid became airborne and stuck to the insides of the bowl.

In future, I will mix by hand or possibly dissolve the fine powders in water and add to the salt, then dry out. I need to explore the chemistry first though.

Thanks for all your help peeps.
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Postby wheels » Thu Jun 10, 2010 12:38 pm

I'm pleased it all worked out OK.

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Re: All confused over mixes.

Postby Pat Smith » Wed Mar 05, 2014 3:13 pm

I know that this topic isn't up to date anymore but I hope you will forgive me for posting my reply anyway. While it may be true that the only available curing salt in Czech supermarkets is "Praganda" it is not true that there are no other options. You just have to check out wholesale markets or the internet. The only downside is that you will only get it in large quantities, however it's not really expensive either. See for example: http://www.eurosol.cz/produkty/dusitanova0300.html
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Re: All confused over mixes.

Postby wheels » Sun Mar 09, 2014 1:18 am

Welcome Pat. :D :D

Thank you. That's exactly the type of curing salt I was referring to earlier.

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