Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Air dried cured Meat Techniques

Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Postby Weoochaun » Sun Jul 05, 2015 4:36 am

Cut out 2 coppa 950g and 1250g and a bresola 1000g (not sure if its the right bit but its lean).
Curing with the usual culprits, minus juniper that I can't get here and ready made curing salts.
Method is to cure in a ziplock in a regular fridge for about 14 days.

I rubbed down with the mixtures but the amount of NO2 and NO3 is really tiny. About 0.1g of each per piece! Weighed it out separately for each piece and spread it over the surface as evenly as possible. Massaged well once in the bag and after 4 hours massaged and turned over. Again 15 hours later massaged and turned. Now I think that a massage and turn every 3-4 days will do for the remaining time.

Don't know how much of the chemical was left on my hands and not in the bag and don't know how well it will be distributed about the meat. Will let you know!
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Re: Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Postby wheels » Sun Jul 05, 2015 11:32 am

Yes, for 1kg, you'd be using 0.15gm of each, or thereabouts. I'd be tempted to grind it with a portion of the salt in (say) an electric coffee bean grinder to try and spread it evenly throughout the mix.

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Re: Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Postby RodinBangkok » Sun Jul 05, 2015 12:09 pm

Your going to be much better off in the long run combining the nitrite and nitrate with the salt to get a larger quantity as suggested above. But be careful here the grind of the salt needs to be the same as the chemicals and then mixed very thoroughly to insure a homogenous blend, as a secondary precaution to this always re-blend the mixture each time before use to insure there was no settling.
Make sure your using a good scale that is accurate to 0.1 gram minimum for doing this, better if you have a .01 accuracy scale for small batches.
Always keep your pure nitrites and nitrates in a special place away from your other ingredients.
We used to blend out own, and I personally did the blending, at my house with no access to the pure chemicals to anyone at our kitchen.
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Re: Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Postby Weoochaun » Sun Jul 05, 2015 1:36 pm

My scale is accurate to 0.005g. However I don't mix the chemical with the salt before adding to the meat.
So Rod, you apparently did this and was it OK? I would think that without having a very even size of crystal it must be better to add the salt and the nitrates/nitrites separately.
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Re: Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Postby RodinBangkok » Sun Jul 05, 2015 2:48 pm

You can always put the salt and chemicals into solution if you want to continue to use small batches. The surface are of the meat given the small quantities does not lend itself to uniform distribution. The salt will aid in osmosis but its difficult to say if you will get uniform distribution using such small quantities of dry ingredients.
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Re: Curing muscle with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate.

Postby Weoochaun » Mon Jul 06, 2015 12:36 am

Considered dissolving it first but wanted to adhere as close as possible to tried and tested 'ziplock curing' methods.
I'm interested to hear how "blending" your own went for you. I would have thought it would be nigh on impossible without sophisticated kit making sure all the granules were the same size.
@ Wheels. It was such a small amount of chemical (about the size of a matchstick head) that I didn't want to loose any of it. Maybe sticking to the side of the grinder or in the solution left behind if I dissolved it. So I transferred directly from my scale to the meat and then with salt covered finger tried to spread it around a bit!
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