Bacon
A very simple bacon recipe made with a dry cure to EU standards.
Ingredients
Per Kg of meat (pork loin or belly)
- 8.25 g Sugar I use white castor sugar but use whatever takes your fancy.
- 25 g Salt (Sodium Chloride) 2.5% Table salt, sea salt, whatever you like.
- 2.4 g Cure number 1 0.24% or 150 ppm Sodium Nitrite
Instructions
Weigh out and thoroughly mix the cure ingredients
- I weigh each ingredient and add it to a small storage jar so that I can shake the jar to mix the ingredients. You want a homogeneous mixture.
Prepare the meat
- If you are using Belly, I include the bones when weighing but I like to separate them from the belly and then cure both belly and ribs together in the same vac bag to make bacon ribs. You could leave the bones attached but I just think that the cure will penetrate the meat better with them separated.
- If you are using pork loin these are often sold rolled and tied up with string. Remove the string and flatten out the loin.
Add the cure
- Rub the cure into the meat on all sides. I do this in a plastic tub to catch the inevitable cure that falls off. You will need to work quickly as the cure will draw moisture from the meat straight away. If you are too slow the expelled water will make it difficult to seal the vac bag in the next step.
Vac pack
- Place the meat and cure in a vac bag. Tip in any residual cure from your plastic tub and vacuum seal it.
Leave to cure
- Leave the vac packed meat in the bottom of the fridge for 10 days minimum, 2 weeks max. Give the meat a daily massage at least in the first few days to distribute the cure.
- After your desired time give the meat a brief rinse under cold water and pat dry with kitchen roll or a clean tea towel. Put back in the fridge to dry out for a few days, up to a week. Slice and eat, or vac pack and freeze.
- I smoke cured belly after the final drying stage and before thickly slicing and vac packing. I use smoked belly mainly as a cooking ingredient in any recipe that calls for Pancetta.
Boiled and baked Ham
This is a recipe for curing a leg of pork and poaching and baking it with a mustard glaze. Great for special occasions. The preparation of the ham is my own, adapted from various sources. The cooking of the ham is a Garry Rhodes recipe from "New British Classics", a BBC publication
Ingredients
- 1 Boned and rolled leg of pork 3Kg is about the biggest I can handle, limited by the size of the poaching pan.
Curing mix per Kg of meat
- 25 g Sea salt 2.5%
- 15 g White sugar 1.5%
- 2.4 g Cure #1 0.24%
Instructions
Curing the pork leg to make ham
- Undo the rolled joint (cut the string), rub the dry cure over the meat, with the lions share on the meat and the rest on the skin.
- Re-tie and vac pack. You will need to work quite quickly as the meat will start to ooze liquid straight away and this can make it difficult to vac pack.
- Put in the bottom of the fridge for 10 days minimum, 2 weeks max. Give the joint a massage and turn it daily or thereabouts.
- Remove from the vac bag and rinse away the goo.
Cooking the ham
- Before cooking, I soak my ham for 24 hours in several changes of water, others don't. Soaking works for me, giving a less salty product.
- Simmer the ham with a couple of onions, bay leaves, a few cloves and a few black pepper corns for 20 minutes per 450g. The ham should be poached rather than boiled, so a very gentle simmer is all that is needed.
- Remove the ham from the stock and allow to cool for 10 – 15 minutes.
- Cut away the skin but leave as much fat as you can. The strings can be removed at this stage as the ham should now have "set".
- Score the fat into a diamond pattern and smear English mustard over the surface. Sprinkle with brown sugar and a drizzle of honey.
- Bake in a preheated oven (190°C) for about 30 minutes or until the glaze slightly caramelises. Watch that it doesn't burn. The ham is already cooked you are just caramelising the glaze at this stage.
- Remove from the oven and leave to rest for 15 – 20 minutes before slicing or leave to slice cold.
Notes
Note that the curing process here is basically the same as bacon – no surprises there, they are basically the same product.
I like to serve thick slices of ham with puy lentils cooked in some of the ham stock and mixed with diced carrot, celery and onion with maybe some boiled carrots.
Pancetta
A simple cured ham in the style of Pancetta. Traditional Pancetta is rolled and stuffed with herbs. I don't roll and stuff it, I just like it au naturel. This is my own recipe – it's very simple indeed.
Ingredients
Per Kg belly pork
- 25 g Salt (Sodium Chloride) Sea salt, table salt, whatever salt you like.
- 12.5 g White sugar You can use brown but I don't like the flavour that it imparts.
- 2.4 g Cure #2 0.24% which gives 150 ppm Sodium Nitrite plus 96 ppm Sodium Nitrate based on UK supplied Cure#2.
Instructions
Weigh out and thoroughly mix the cure ingredients
- I weigh each ingredient and add it to a small storage jar so that I can shake the jar to mix the ingredients. You want a homogeneous mixture.
Prepare the meat
- This is usually made with a thick piece of Belly, I remove the bones before weighing, save them for bbq ribs (although there won't be much meat on them because you will have dissected them out to leave most of the meat for the Pancetta).
Add the cure
- Rub the cure into the meat on all sides. I do this in a plastic tub to catch the inevitable cure that falls off. You will need to work quickly as the cure will draw moisture from the meat straight away.
Vac pack
- Place the meat and cure in a vac bag. Tip in any residual cure from your plastic tub and vacuum seal it.
Leave to cure
- Leave the vac packed meat in the bottom of the fridge for 10 days minimum, 2 weeks max. Give the meat a daily massage at least in the first few days to distribute the cure.
- After your desired time give the meat a brief rinse under cold water and pat dry with kitchen roll.
- This is where you need some ingenuity. Hang your cured meat in your alpine cave, or cold garage in a UK winter, to dry out slowly and naturally. You want the meat to loose at least 30% of its weight in moisture. It helps if you weigh it at this stage so you can keep track of its weight loss.
- An alternative drying method is to use your domestic fridge. In theory this is far too dry and the meat will dry too quickly and harden on the edges, preventing the centre from drying properly. However, if you vac pack it at the point it starts to harden on the outside and leave it for a week or so in the vac bag the moisture will be drawn from the centre to the outside and you can then dry it further. Not for the purists but this does work and it means that you can make Pancetta all year round.
- Once dry to your satisfaction slice very thinly and enjoy as a fine starter with some fresh figs, dressed with some good olive oil or however you like it.
Salami with fennel seed
This is based on Tuscan Salami from Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This is delicious with an aperitif or on Pizzas.
Ingredients
Weights per Kg meat
- 22.1 g Salt
- 2.4 g Cure #2 0.24% or 150 ppm Sodium Nitrite and 96 ppm Sodium Nitrate.
- 26.5 g Water For mixing with the Bactoferm.
- 0.6 g Bactoferm This is a bacterial culture to ferment the lactose to lower the pH.
- 30.1 g Milk powder
- 13.2 g Dextrose
- 5.3 g Fennel seeds Toasted and coarsely ground in a pestle and mortar. You want to be able to identify fennel seeds in the final sausage, so don't grind them too fine.
- 5.3 g Black pepper Ground to a powder
- 2.7 g Garlic
- 55 ml Wine A Chianti would seem appropriate. I only spend about a fiver on this and keep the rest as cooking wine in the fridge.
- Beef middle sausage skins
Instructions
Prepare the meat
- I use a mixture of pork shoulder and fatty belly at about 1.5 :1. Mince the shoulder on a 6mm plate and the belly on an 8mm plate.
Weigh out all the ingredients
- Make up the Bactoferm according to the supplied instructions. This is just simply to rehydrate the dried culture.
- Thoroughly mix all the ingredients together with the meat as you would any sausage mixture and stuff into the beef middles. Squeeze the mixture down the sausage to remove any air pockets.
- Tie off sausages to about 12 inches long. Any longer and they may be too heavy for successful hanging. Tie them first with a simple knot then loop over the skin and tie again with a full knot.
- Prick the sausages all over with a fine needle. You can buy a salami pricker for this very purpose. This is to let the gas produced by the fermentation out of the sausage. You won't notice the holes in the final product.
Leave to ferment
- Leave the tied sausages overnight at room temperature (20°c) in a plastic box to get the Bactoferm going. You will be able to detect the CO2 being given off if you give them a sniff.
Hang the sausages
- I hang mine from the roof in my garage and I only make these in winter. The temperature in my garage from December onwards is usually between 5 and 12°c. If it gets any warmer you may have to move the sausages to a fridge. They will drip a little in the first few days so put something to catch the drips.
- You want to achieve about 30-40% weight loss as they dry out. It helps to weigh them at the start so you can keep a check on them.
- A white mould developing on the outside that looks like a camembert type mould is a good thing.
- Any other mould developing is a bad thing. But do not worry. Any grey or black moulds can be easily removed by wiping the sausage with kitchen towel dipped in a little white vinegar. The low pH of the vinegar is very effective at keeping the mould under control. You may have to wipe them just a couple of times. The vinegar smell may be alarming but you won't notice it in the final product.
- The last ones I made in winter 2019 took just under a month to dry. You can leave them longer, depends how dry/hard you like them.
- Slice and enjoy. Or vac pack and freeze. People say you should not freeze salami. I find it freezes very well when vac packed which means I can have Salami all year round.