Reaction & Commentary
Back the use of salt as a preservation method all the way back to ancient civilizations like Rome and Egypt now with the Advent of refrigeration and freezers this has kind of fallen out of favor and it’s almost becoming a lost art so how does this actually work
When we salt meat it draws out the moisture creating an in-hospital environment to bad bacterias such as listeria and creating a hospital environment for bacterias that love salt these bacterias move in and create lactic acid lactic acid then in turn changes the flavor makes it even more delicious and promotes good molds like
Penicillin and I know mold on your food might sound a little scary but it goes back again for ages and ages very traditional and good for you there’s only three things that we need to get started we need our good quality meat a bin of some type to do your curing in
Some pure salt you want to check that your salt is only one ingredient that’s the really really important part here your salt should only be salt if you check the back of the container of salt you might be surprised that there’s often two or three more ingredients than Salt a lot
Of times that’s to help it not Clump together to make it more pourable sometimes salts are fortified to have extra minerals in them but we do not want that in our meat so make sure that you Source a pure salt that can be a sea salt Himalayan pink
Salt cell grease there’s lots of different salts um but just make sure it is pure salt I like to get mine from Azure standard they have good prices on bulk salt and so I’ll usually just buy like a 25 pound bag and then I’m set for a year or so
So I’ve got a small one here and I put a little bit of pepper on it totally optional not necessary but delicious so now I’m going to show you guys on this larger cut how to do the same thing this is all really thick piece of pork
Belly and it still has all the fat on so it’s going to give us definitely a different product the nice skinny little guy well they’re both going to be equally delicious and we use the exact same method to cure both pieces of meat so this is called the salt box method
And the theory is whatever sticks to the surface of the meat is enough to cure it there’s a lot of recipes now that are very technical and get really overwhelming and discouraging because you have to weigh things out to the gram and they call for curing salts and all
These additives and extra things and if you think about it like I said earlier this is a very ancient and time-tested preservation method and I highly doubt that the ancient Egyptians and Romans were sitting there with their digital scales weighing everything to the precise gram
So I like the Saltbox method it has been no fail for me so far on muscle whole muscle cures There we go a nice even little coating of salt all over him and that’s all it takes to make this beautiful hunk of pork shelf stable for now until all of eternity We’re gonna set it in this bus tub now I have a bus tub so this is what I’m going to use but if you don’t have one don’t feel like you need to run out and buy one you can use the vegetable crisper in your fridge and that’s going
To work just as well you can put it on um like I have it on a little cooling rack here just a cheap little cooling rack to keep it out of the brine because as the salt does it’s a work it’s going to pull out all the moisture right
And that’s the whole point in some cures we want it to sit in the Brine and have that osmosis like with a ham when you do something in a brine it sucks that salt water back into itself so it can penetrate deeply through a thicker cut
Of meat like a ham or a loin in those situations we would want the osmosis but in this one for a flatter thin piece of meat like for a pork belly or maybe a um like a Slimmer cut of beef we really don’t want that because it’ll get too
Salty so either set it up on a little tray so that it can drain and not sit in the fluid or be really studious about emptying this container once or twice a day we’re gonna let these sit somewhere cool for about five days or until you’re not seeing liquid come out anymore
So a really big piece of meat you might need to go eight or nine days and if you forget about them in the fridge for eight nine ten days nothing bad is going to happen to them so minimum five days up to a week or two when you get to them
And then we’ll be back for the next step welcome back everybody um it’s actually been 10 days since our last segment and if I seem a little off today I’m pretty sick so that’s why it’s been so long and in between also so nothing is wrong with going a little
Over which I mentioned before it’s pretty flexible and I would have liked to come back at five days to continue this process but 10 days later nothing is going to be wrong with that so let’s go ahead and continue we’ve got our meat that has been resting it was just salted
And then lay it aside to let all that moisture pull out and you’ll notice when you go back for your meat after it’s been setting it’s really rigid right it’s not flopping around anymore that’s pretty firm solid so you’ll be able to notice that if it’s still really really floppy and really
Really wet I think this is pretty dry to the touch those would be signs of something being maybe a miss you might want to add a little bit more of your salt and then let it continue to drain if you’re still seeing fluid in your container and you’re having a
Floppy meat so even this large piece is very rigid now very solid So for the next step we need to rinse these off and then Pat them dry And we rinse it off just to get any excess salt and spices off we didn’t use any spices really this time but just to make sure we get any big clumps of salt that might still be clinging to the surface as those would add just unpalatable not very pleasant spots later on And then you just want to use some kind of non-peely towel a tea towel or like I’m using a cloth napkin something that’s not going to get fuzzies all over your meat but just to Pat up that excess moisture now all that’s left to do is hang this
You can use a little metal hook something like this is really nice and convenient or if you don’t want to invest in these yet you can just use some butcher’s twine so you’re going to use the butcher’s twine you’d want to take a knife and
Make a little hole in the corner and put your twine through there this time I’m going to go ahead and use my hook and I’m just going to put it in the middle here they also make multi-timed ones for larger pieces like this but a little more expensive than I haven’t
Purchased one yet so that’ll do just one hook like that I’m gonna go hang this somewhere cool and dark for five days before I start slicing it and frying it like bacon or if you want to eat it raw like a prosciutto or something you would need
To weigh it right now and then wait for it to lose 30 percent of its body weight before you start eating it raw but this one is going to be like a bacon I’m gonna go hang it up for five days and then start slicing frying and
Okay we are at the end the best step it is ready to eat it’s been hanging for 10 days now we can slice it and fry it and enjoy homemade bacon Foreign we’ve got our thick and thin pieces here and I’m going to show you some of the differences that you can see now at this point in the Cure and then we’re going to cook some up so on our larger thicker piece of meat here you can see a little
Tiny bit of maybe mold it’s so tiny but it could be putting on a tiny bit of white penicillin on our thinner piece that we cured you’re going to see a little bit of salt scabbing this kind of crystallized shiny patch here is where the salt accumulated a little strongly
And it’s called a scab you can see a little bit of it right here as well a little bit of salt scabbing and that’s not the end of the world that just means there was more salt than the meat needed and so it rejected it a
Little bit and they’re just it forms a little bit of a scalp so to remedy this if you do your single ingredient salt cured meat and it is too salty because most of us beginners we tend to over salt rather than under salt because we are worried about that bacterial growth
So if you got a little too salty and you have some scabbing no worries what you’ll do is you’ll cut your meat into either one chunk that you’re going to use or into lots of slices however you plan to use it cut it off your main
Piece put it in a dish of water for an hour before you use it and that’ll help pull some of that extra salt out and it won’t be too salty anymore but you can also just use it and leave Salt out of the rest of your dish and
Your bacon will act as your salting agent that’s incredible in like a pot of beans super yummy all right let’s slice a couple of these and fry them up right now it’s not too bad to slice the longer you let it dry hang the dryer it’ll get so it’ll never go bad but
Eventually it will turn Rock Solid and at that point what is common traditionally is you would then grate it like parmesan on top of dishes just for that extra flavor this is a fun surprise because I didn’t know what was inside of this whole muscle before I cured it look
How much marbling this is actually a lot of fat content in this little piece of rib belly flush so this is going to be a lot more tender and moist than I anticipated so we’ve got a really fatty bacon from that skinny piece and we’ve got a really
Meaty lean bacon from our thicker cup let’s fry these up you can see that that just rendering down right away The fatty pieces cook up way faster than the lean pieces so the ones that were a little bit more fatty are definitely a little bit more brittle so that fat renders down and they just get incredibly tender and brittle these ones are going to be a little bit more
Toothsome they’re very meaty but so delicious that is a really thick hearty bacon let’s try out the thick cut one first mm-hmm okay that is super yummy it is a little bit more tooth some it’s almost like a ham has a lot more fiber to it then like the packaged bacon we’re used
To so it’s more like that it’s like a cross between ham and bacon you have some more muscle fiber that you can really feel salty crunchy perfection the thinner pieces that had more fat burning throughout are going to be more what we’re used to where they’re really
Crispy with not a lot of muscle fiber feel where they just kind of crunch and melt away thank you Very crispy you don’t feel a lot of that muscle fiber very good neither one of these was actually too salty I was a little bit concerned about the thinner piece with the salt scapping being too salty but it really wasn’t so even if you have some
Salt scabbing give it a try first fry up a test piece and then decide if you need to soak it to get rid of that extra salt so that’s it it’s that simple with one ingredient you can preserve any piece of whole muscle meat indefinitely
I hope you enjoyed and let me know in the comments if you want more videos like this or if you’ve given it a try thank you for staying tuned you guys if you enjoyed this video I think you’re really gonna like this one give it a look next have a great one
