Preserving meat with salt

25-3 to the Weight of the Meat Minimum. After the beef remained in the salt for twenty-four hours youd drain it and pack it into a wooden barrel.

The dry curing method is used to preserve small cuts of meat such as bacon and small hams.

Preserving meat with salt. Using salt to preserve meat was a widely used method well up until the 19th century. Salt is used to inhibit the growth of microorganisms by pulling all the water out of each cell within a piece of meat. Salted meat and fish are still staples in many parts of the world such as the Arctic coastal parts of Russia North Africa Southern China.

The Basics of Salting and Preserving Meat. The key to salting meat is the process of diffusion. The tendency for substances to disperse through another substance until equilibrium is reached.

Dissolve 1 cup pickling salt ½ cup of brown sugar 1 tablespoon sodium nitrate Prague Powder 1 aka pink curing salt and 1 teaspoon baking soda in 1 gallon of warm water. Add 2 tablespoons pickling spice 2 teaspoons paprika a dozen bay leaves and four garlic cloves. Cool and pour over meat in crock.

Make sure all the meat is covered. Cod is often preserved in salt using a 20 brine solution. At this level of 20 salinity water is effectively drawn out of any microorganism that will spoil the meat.

The fish will last several months in the fridge longer than it would without the salt. The same process can also be done with coarse salt without the brine. Lard has been used to preserve meat for centuries generally speaking preserving meat in lard is a lot of work and it only preserves the meat for around 6-9 months.

Before you preserve meat in lard you will have to first cure it with salt and even cook the meat although this will depend on what kind of meat you are preserving. Generally four- to six-inch slabs work best. Mix 12 pound of pickling salt with 14 cup of brown sugar.

This is enough to cover twelve pounds of pork. Liberally cover the pork with this mixture. Next pack the meat into sterilized crocks or jars.

You should make sure it is tightly packed. Without salt bacteria would grow in and on the meat and quickly cause it to go bad. The basic role of salt in curing is to dehydrate the meat just enough so that bacteria cannot thrive.

However even if you have the convenience of refrigeration curing is a great way to preserve the natural flavors of the meat as well as to keep essential. Some still use it today but now it is more about enhancing the flavor of the meat not about preserving it. Meat spoils because it is a good place for bacteria to thrive in.

Bacteria need water and there is a lot of water content in the meat especially the muscle fibers. This is solved by introducing salt. Salt Preservation Basics What kind of salt should I use to preserve meats.

There are several salts that are used to cure or preserve meat. Sodium chloride ordinary table salt is the primary ingredient helping create an environment where bacteria cannot grow and removing moisture within. But other salts are needed to complete meat preservation.

After the beef remained in the salt for twenty-four hours youd drain it and pack it into a wooden barrel. Then youd prepare the preserving brine. This would consist of seven pounds of salt one ounce each of saltpeter potassium nitrate also used in making gunpowder and cayenne pepper one quart of molasses and eight gallons of soft water.

25-3 to the Weight of the Meat Minimum. Metric Scale is Easier 1000 grams of Meat say pork belly 30 grams of salt there is also a meat curing calculator using the equilibrium curing at the top of the page The salt preserving method youll see below which is saturating the meat with a dry salt mix and drawing out some of the water. In Mesopotamia around 3000 BC it was recorded that meat and fish were preserved in sesame oil dried and salted in order to store them for when food was scarce.

By 200 BC salt curing was common in Greece and popular in the Roman Empire. Significant advancement was made by the nineteenth century to refine preserving cured meat. The dry curing method is used to preserve small cuts of meat such as bacon and small hams.

The curing salt is applied to the surface of the meat and then placed in the refrigerator in a sealed bag. Note that the ideal temperature in which to cure meat is between 36 F and 40 F which is the average temperature of home kitchen refrigerators.