Equilibrium Curing: The Meat Cannot Get Saltier Than the Salt You Gave It

**Green weight** is the weight of the meat before anything is done to it. Every percentage in a cure is of that number, exactly as the weight of fibre is in dyeing, and for the same reason: it is what makes a recipe transferable. Weigh the trimmed piece, write the number down, and use it for the salt, the sugar, the curing salt and later for the weight loss. Typical percentages of green weight: * **salt 2.0 to 3.0%** — 2.5% is the standard target * **sugar 0.5 to 1.5%** — balances the salt, feeds fermentation if there is any * **curing salt #1 0.25%** — which delivers exactly 156 ppm of nitrite * **spices to taste** — they are not part of the safety calculation A scale reading to a gram is enough for the salt on a kilo of meat. For the curing salt, which is a quarter of one percent, use a scale that reads to 0.1 g — an error of a gram there is a 40% error in the nitrite.

**Weigh, mix, seal.** Weigh the trimmed meat, work out and weigh the cure, rub all of it over the whole surface, and seal it in a bag with as little air as possible. A vacuum bag is ideal; a zip bag with the air pressed out works. **Refrigerate the whole time.** 3 to 5 C. The cure is not a preservative until it has penetrated, so the meat is ordinary raw meat for the first days and must be kept like it. **Turn it daily.** Liquid comes out of the meat and pools; turning keeps every surface in contact with it. That liquid is the cure and stays in the bag. **Rinse at the end**, briefly, and pat dry. This removes surface salt only — the salt inside is where the flavour and the safety are, and a rinse cannot take it out. **Rest before drying or smoking.** A day uncovered in the fridge lets the surface dry and form a pellicle, which is the tacky skin that smoke actually sticks to. Smoking a wet surface deposits far less.

A wet cure — a brine — does the same arithmetic in water, and the same equilibrium logic applies: weigh the salt against the **meat plus the water** together, and the whole system comes to the target concentration. So for 2 kg of meat in 2 litres of water at 2.5%, the salt is 2.5% of 4000 g = 100 g. Not 2.5% of the meat, and not 2.5% of the water. Brine is the better choice in three cases: **Awkward shapes.** A whole bird or a bone-in piece cures evenly in liquid and very unevenly under dry salt. **Large pieces, quickly.** Liquid carries salt to the whole surface at once. **When juiciness matters.** A brined piece gains weight and holds it through cooking, which is why poultry is brined and bacon is not. For a thick piece, the centre can be reached by **injecting** some of the brine with a syringe rather than waiting for diffusion — which is exactly how commercial hams are cured in days rather than months, and it is the one part of industrial practice that is worth borrowing at home.