Immersion Curing - Surface Area

[captain wassname]

crap
dont know what went wrong still better than inactivity.

Jim

[BriCan]

Your observations/views would be appreciated.

Phil

I have read and re-read this thread so many times my head hurts

If I take a belly weighing 10 - 12 lbs with a thickness at the thickest part 1 1/2 inches and drop it into my brine tank it will be completely cured in 3 day (fact). If I take a boneless pork loin again weighing (approx) 10 - 12 lbs, the eye being 3 inches thick by 3 inches wide and again drop it into the brine tank it will be completely cured in 3 days.

Facts of the brine tank: brand new cure, cure originates from the UK (Lucas) and produced under license for me out this way.

I do not use this brine at full strength as I find (as do my customers) to salty (your first clue ), I use my brine's 3 times before replacing as they grow weaker as with each use.

Please remember that I have been in the trade for over 45 years, to us it is not rocket science it is just that we have been doing it for so long it tends to be second nature. How to calculate it is something else which is why I ave asked a friend who also is in the trade and this side is his speciality.

The three thing one has to remember are temperature, time and salt.

If I was to say 'go suck an egg' and you thought about that then you will be on the right track. Take a glass of salt water a and take a mouth full and hold in mouth (the sucking part of the egg). The salt will start drawing moisture from your mouth, the same thing happens to meat when placed in brine.

So in theory the more salt the quicker the cross over, the warmer the brines are the faster they work (there are hot brines that work real fast) which come to the last part which is time.

If it is clear as mud tell me so as these are my findings working with different brines over the years. Equations are not my thing, I will leave that for others.

Time is a big factor when curing and I know as I only have a 3 - 4 day window on a rush job, this is where my reputation comes into play

With that I see my time has slipped away so now we are down to 2 hours sleep .... again

[Oddley]

captain wassname because you said it twice, don't make it twice as true...

If I understand you right you are saying that a 4Kg 4cm belly of pork will cure in about same time as a bone out 4Kg 15 cm leg joint. I personally don't believe it.

I'm starting to get past that and start to accept, solute drag with dissipation and osmosis in the early stages, with dissipation and osmosis in the later stages.

[wheels]

If I understand you right you are saying that a 4Kg 4cm belly of pork will cure in about same time as a bone out 4Kg 15 cm leg joint. I personally don't believe it.

I too find this hard to come to terms with, but before going further, do we know whether NCPaul's current tests are likely to 'throw light' on this?

Phil

[NCPaul]

I have started working on the preliminaries of my planned experiment; I hope to use the method described in this paper.

http://www.fda.gov.tw/files/publish_per ... /10_18.pdf

I like that it is a direct determination of both nitrate and nitrite. I have run the calibrations and I have either found out something interesting about my curing salts or my calibration is crap.

[captain wassname]

Oddley and Phil What Im saying is that if you put a 4kg loin and a 4 kg belly into identical brines I think they will reach 50+% of equilibriumum within hours of each other.
Ater this when they are in the "slow stage" then thickness will be a major factor.
Im not looking to be twice as right but possibly the least wrong.
I shall now print out NCPauls pdf and hurt my brain.
Many thanks for a further experiment NCPaul.

Jim

[wheels]

I agree with Jim - big thanks NCPaul.

Jim - I like the concept of, "I'm not looking to be twice as right but possibly the least wrong." I think that the 10 days per kg achieved this with the best margins for error.

That's not saying that other time scales aren't feasible. It's interesting to note that (technically) the 10 day per kg brine I did recently would still have been within safe curing territory even if I had only cured it for just over 4 days per kg.

Phil

[NCPaul]

Failure. I was trying to follow the absorption of sodium nitrite using the method I cited above. Unfortunately, for some very technical reasons, I would have had to done the cure in a 70/30 mixture of water and methanol, possibly with an octylammonium phosphate buffer as well. That is quite far from "normal" curing so whatever data I may have come up with would have been of limited value. I was keen to follow the nitrite since I'm not sure how it reaches equilibrium if it is constantly being converted to NO and reacting with the meat. Maybe I can get my younger brother interested in this problem; he has better equipment and is better at this type of testing. Don't tell him that.

[saucisson]

OK, I won't

[beardedwonder5]

If I supply an expert with 1mg sample taken from, say, 20 mm beneath the surface of an "in cure" piece of pork, can the expert determine the amount of "cure" in that sample?

[wheels]

When I contacted a lab who are Public Analysts they said that a 200g sample would be best - that was for testing the salt level.

Phil

[beardedwonder5]

So a sequence of tests would (besides costing a bomb) use up the ham!

My wife used to work in a "protein lab" - with extremely expensive machines and extremely small quantities. As far as I could understand inorganic compounds, like salt, can't easily be quantified if the samples are very small. So I guess if you are brining a hundred hams, and have no precedents, you can accumulate knowledge by sacrificing a ham a week.

Slight change of suject. About 50 years ago I watched a guy in a slaughterhouse injecting hams with a double-action pump, and some scales to weigh the amount of cure added to the ham. What are the disadvantages to this method? )I assume the flesh has to be dealt with soom after death.)

[captain wassname]

If I take a belly weighing 10 - 12 lbs with a thickness at the thickest part 1 1/2 inches and drop it into my brine tank it will be completely cured in 3 day (fact). If I take a boneless pork loin again weighing (approx) 10 - 12 lbs, the eye being 3 inches thick by 3 inches wide and again drop it into the brine tank it will be completely cured in 3 days.

Facts of the brine tank: brand new cure, cure originates from the UK (Lucas) and produced under license for me out this way.

I do not use this brine at full strength as I find (as do my customers) to salty (your first clue ), I use my brine's 3 times before replacing as they grow weaker as with each use.

Please remember that I have been in the trade for over 45 years, to us it is not rocket science it is just that we have been doing it for so long it tends to be second nature. How to calculate it is something else which is why I ave asked a friend who also is in the trade and this side is his speciality.

The three thing one has to remember are temperature, time and salt.

If I was to say 'go suck an egg' and you thought about that then you will be on the right track. Take a glass of salt water a and take a mouth full and hold in mouth (the sucking part of the egg). The salt will start drawing moisture from your mouth, the same thing happens to meat when placed in brine.

So in theory the more salt the quicker the cross over, the warmer the brines are the faster they work (there are hot brines that work real fast) which come to the last part which is time.

If it is clear as mud tell me so as these are my findings working with different brines over the years. Equations are not my thing, I will leave that for others.

Time is a big factor when curing and I know as I only have a 3 - 4 day window on a rush job, this is where my reputation comes into play

With that I see my time has slipped away so now we are down to 2 hours sleep .... again

Can you put both pieces in together? Would it still be 3 days.
I suppose what Im asking is.
Is it 3 days per 10/12 lb ham or some sort of calculation if you were doing a smaller piece,or more peces.

Jim

Jim

[captain wassname]

From my limited experimentation it would seem that surface area and skin cover have little effect in take up as far as weight gain is concerned .
Early days yet Ive only done 4 pieces ranging from 1.3 to 2.4 kgs.

[wheels]

Jim

I do them infrequently as well. However, I'm happy to keep plodding away at it and eventually I'm sure that we'll get an answer.

Phil