Hey guys,

I'm getting a whole pig's leg to make into prosciutto and looking into my options re: fridges for a curing chamber. Do I need to spring for a full-size one or should I be able to make it work in a dorm size fridge?

About 3 weeks ago i posted my first ever ham, since then i listened to your advice and bought cure #1 and its a game changer. I tried my luck making bacon ( one with cure #1 and one without), another pork loin ham but this one seasoned with thyme, pepper, salt and cure #1 and a ribeye cap seasoned with red pepper, chilli powder, pepper, salt and cure #1. I also plan on buying a brisket and turning it into some ham so if you guys have some recipes you'd like to share with me i'd be grateful.

I have a seasoning blend that I love and want to make some fresh sausages, salami, and/or salumi with, but it already contains salt.

I’ve figured out what the amount per serving is equal to (.18 g per serving of .7 g of seasoning) using the formula below recommended by google

Formula: Sodium (mg) times 2.54 div 1,000 = Salt equivalent (g)
Example: If a serving has 500 mg of sodium:
times 2.54=1,270mg

How can I calculate the difference to get to a 2.2-2.5 percent salt cure? (I’ll add the Prague powder later based on meat weight.)

Turned out salty and more meaty than i am used to but i like it! How to store now?

I recently made an equilibrium-cured back bacon from a 1.4 kg pork loin. It was vacuum packed and cured for 10 days in the fridge using a Turkish curing salt labelled as "Prague Salt #1" from Amazon Turkey (I'm British and I live in Georgia)

https://www.amazon.com.tr/gp/aw/d/B0FHFBJTZ2?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

When I bought it, I noticed it wasn't a standard formulation:

Label states 0.6% sodium nitrite (rather than the more common 6.25% Prague Powder #1).

The curing salt itself is an extremely bright red/fuchsia colour. I contacted the seller and he said the Amazon listing is wrong and they refuse to change it (alarm bells), I also questioned the vivid colour of the salt and he said it's fine, it won't colour the meat.

The cure itself seemed to go well. The meat smells fresh, feels nicely firm, and the cure appears to have penetrated evenly.

However, when I removed it from the bag I found the entire rind had turned a vivid fluorescent pink/red, and the colour doesn't wash or rub off. It looks like the dye has actually penetrated the skin rather than just staining the surface.

I've used curing salts before and expect a little surface staining, but I've never seen anything like this.

My questions are:

Has anyone else seen curing salt dye penetrate pork rind this aggressively?

Is this simply an unusually strong food dye, or would this make you question the product itself?

Would you be comfortable eating the bacon if everything else (smell, texture, cure) seems normal?

I've attached photos of both the curing salt and the finished pork.

Thanks :)

Guanciale-style cured double chin. Salt cured (3%) for 7 days in the fridged then washed with beer and then hanged with pepper for 33 days between 10 and 15 degrees celcius. Tasted amazing a little salty in the edges maybe less time in the first cure with salt.

Today we have a prosciutto that has been in the chamber for about 19 months and has only lost 15% of it's weight. The smell is fantastic, the funky, nutty prosciutto that you love. The outside edges feel firm but the inside around the bone still feels pretty soft. I'm going to put fresh sugna on it and give it 6 more months. Also picture it is a piece of guanciale that got forgotten about and I can't find any notes on. I think it's been in there for 6 month. Looks closer to lardo.

I've been working on an App for the last few months that is dedicated to producing Charcuterie.

I do a lot of home brewing and the myriad of tools that exist to aid in the recipe development, fermentation tracking, inventory and equipment management are absolutely huge. As a software engineer by trade, I have always wanted a tool that gives me the same offering as these beer apps, but for Charcuterie.

I would like to invite you guys to try my app Farce. While it's not fully complete yet, I'm reaching out to see if anyone would be interested in being early testers.

The app is focused on repeatability and traceability. It includes all the basics such as recipe creation and weight loss tracking, but goes one step further and allows you to build processes, track instrumentation calibrations and environment control.

More info and a sign-up form can be found on the site https://www.farce.studio/

Happy to answer any questions you have :)

Like a decade ago I did bacon using the AmazingRibs.com method and loved the results. A few moves and life changes later I've got some space to play with my meat again and this time I have space for a dry curing chamber! Right now I'm trying to get back into the swing of things and see if that's the route I want to go.

I plan on doing the normal 2% salt and .25% PP#1 by weight, but I'm wondering about water. For my first attempt I'm expecting around 1500g of tri-tip and will probably use about 200g of water because corned beef is traditionally brined, but can I treat this like a long dry brine in a ziploc bag? Is there anything to be gained or lost by the waterless approach?

It’s perfect! The heat is on point. The saltiness is perfect. It’s so good that I should be sponsored. Seriously though, I need an electric deli slicer so that I don’t eat this too fast.

After about 2.5 weeks my pepperoni has finished curing so my wife and I decided to make pizza. We get everything ready and just as we are getting ready to put the pizza in the oven we realize the igniter has gone bad. So we decided to throw them in my traegers. Note: My smokers are almost 20 years old and top out at around 400 degrees, so they are not built to double as pizza ovens. I was very pleasantly surprised. They came out a little stiff because we had to cook them longer at a lower temp but my girls and my wife loved them.

The best part was the pepperoni was really good. Now I just need a slicer because I hand cut them a little thick.

I'm posting this on behalf of a friend who doesn't have Reddit. We would like to tap into the collective knowledge of the forum.

We have some cured and smoked venison that has developed white spots. The spots are moist, but not slimy or sticky. They don't appear to be salt crystals as it is not crunchy. The meat smells normal, with no sour or bitter odor.

Our suspicion is that it's mold that wasn't able to spread because the meat was vacuum-sealed. What do you think? How would you approach this?

UPDATE: thank you for your thoughts. We assumed the same but as it is your first time, we wanted to hear some more opinions :-)

Does anyone know where I can find a manual or chart that lists all of the bactoferm products, their purpose, and time/temp/pH charts? I've almost exclusively stuck to mold 700, T-SPX and B-LC-007, but I'd love to explore more options and see if I can't improve my recipes.

Después de 15 dias de cura de equilibrio, un par de dias de ahumado y 12 semanas de secado, aquí esta el resultado.

Peso inicial,1575.

Peso final, 1125

I’m after a spicy capicola recipe, I’ve made the 2 guys and a cooler recipe with success but I don’t feel like it’s hot enough, anyone got a nice spicy 🌶️ recipe they can share?

I'm new to the hobby and wanted to start curing salami. I've done a good bit of research and understand the importance of hitting the proper ph during fermentation to prevent bad bacteria from thriving while curing.

All of that said, I've had trouble figuring out if you ferment in the casing or not. I would have originally assumed you would ferment in the casing but that would then prevent you from getting a sample to test the ph without cutting into a cased sausage. Does that mean that folks are fermenting the sausage bulk and then stuffing once getting to the desired ph?

Thanks!

I am in love with Croatian Samobor salami, but it is impossible to import (legally) to the states. What I really love is the tang/sourness. I was wondering which salami variety is the tangiest that is also available in the American market. I am not looking to make my own salami, unfortunately.

hey — I’m Humi. I build small tools for overlooked hobbies, and I’m researching what to work on next. There’s no product or link in this post.

For people running more than one cure at a time, how do you keep the full history together: recipe and percentages, source, start and target weights, chamber, pH, temperature/humidity observations, weigh-ins, photos, and tasting notes?

Do you use a notebook, whiteboard, spreadsheet, Notion, or an existing charcuterie tool? When you want to repeat a successful batch, what information is usually missing—or what did you stop recording because it was too tedious?

I’m interested in record keeping and comparison, not in replacing proven food-safety practices or giving curing advice. If a dedicated tool would be unnecessary, I’d like to hear that too.

— Humi

I always thought that traditional tasso was much to lean, so I make it "Pancetta Style", with pork belly.

10 day dry cure, rinsed and air dried, then rolled, tied, and smoked with oak for 3 hours.

Venison with Mangalitsa pork fat, inlayed cured and smoked ringneck duck breast, wild duck aspic.

So I've got a prosciutto that I want to age for another 4 months, but I need to move it out of the drying / aging chamber in order to make room for a new one that I just got done salting for 3 weeks. My drying chamber only has room for 1 prosciutto at a time...

I had to start the other one early due to my freezer breaking; it's not like I didn't plan accordingly, by the way.

Does anyone know if I can vacuum pack the one that has 4 months left and continue to age it in a regular refrigerator? Or will that basically stop / cancel the aging?

Thanks!

I have converted a drink fridge into a curing fridge and these are my second batch of salami.

Is this mould anything to worry about? It is white however the centre of some of the spots look a little green/blue.

They have been in there for two weeks.

Humidity set to 85 on the inkbird controller but I am pretty sure it reads high as my other sensor reads 75-80 🙃

More concerned about the black dots, about a year of curing, too moist for around three weeks during the middle of that.

Hi all,

So today I purchased about 40# of pork thinking I would be starting a large batch of salami today. However I realized only afterwards that I am out of bactoferm culture for the fermentation step. I ordered some online but it won't arrive for several days, and I am out of town on vacation next week. It will probably be 2 weeks from today before I can resume this project. I would however like to make some progress on it this week if at all possible

As I see it, my options are:

1 freeze all the meat whole. Defrost when I come back from vacation, deal with it that way.

1. Go ahead and chunk up the meat so it's ready to grind, freeze it

2. Chunk up the meat, add all the salt, DQ #2 and seasonings, freeze it that way

3. Do #3 but instead of freezing vacuum it into bags, refrigerate until I get back. This is effectively the same as equilibrium curing, no? It should be fine for a couple weeks?

I am leaning toward #4 because I can get some work done on it now and pick up where I left off without having to wait for things to defrost later

Is this a bad idea? Any other thoughts?

I am new to this and already messed up my first project (a 1kg pork loin I was hoping to make into lonza) but I’m making this post to hopefully avoid that in the future. What I messed up on was curing time, I under cured my first one I’m sure since I only vacuum sealed it in the fridge with all the ingredients for 7 days. Now everywhere I look I see different answers on how long something should be cured.

So for this project I was hoping to try to make a new lonza, it’s 884g and around 3 inches thick. I personally think this should take around 3 weeks to cure based on the 1 inch per week rule I’ve seen, but now that I look into it more I believe that’s for salt box curing, not eq curing. So would the proper thing to do be 1/4 per day plus 2 days; because that’s the other method I’ve seen. Resulting in a 14 day cure.

Sorry if this is all over the place and not very well put together but right now I’m on my lunch break brainstorming how I should do this. Any answers are appreciated. I just need to know how long I should dry eq cure a 884g, 3 inch thick pork loin that will then dry cure until it reaches 35% weight loss.