Vivid Ready

Salt, and for anything smoked or long-kept, a measured quantity of curing salt. This is the one page in the app where a 0.1 g kitchen scale is a safety instrument rather than a convenience.

Curing is how meat was kept before refrigeration, and it is the process behind bacon, ham, salt beef, salt cod and every dry-cured sausage.

It is also the page in this app that carries the narrowest margin between correct and dangerous, because it involves a substance that is genuinely toxic in quantities only slightly above the useful dose, and that substance looks almost exactly like table salt.

What curing actually does

Two mechanisms, and it matters which one you are relying on.

Salt alone draws water out of the meat by osmosis and out of any bacteria present. Below a certain water activity, most spoilage organisms cannot grow. This is what salt beef and salt cod rely on, and it works, at high salt concentrations, with the meat kept cool.

Salt with sodium nitrite does something salt cannot: it specifically inhibits Clostridium botulinum. Salt at edible concentrations does not reliably stop botulism in an oxygen-poor environment; nitrite does. It also produces the pink colour and the characteristic cured flavour, but those are side effects, not the purpose.

The rule that follows: if the meat will spend time in the danger zone without oxygen, which describes every smoked, hung, rolled or vacuum-packed product, it needs nitrite. If it is heavily salted and kept cold and will be cooked, salt alone may be enough.

The two kinds of salt

Know which is which

Product	Contains	Use for
Prague Powder #1, Cure #1, Insta Cure #1, "pink salt"	93.75% salt, 6.25% sodium nitrite, dyed pink	Anything cured for under 30 days: bacon, pastrami, brined ham, sausages, anything to be cold smoked
Prague Powder #2, Cure #2	Salt, sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate	Long dry-cured products hung for months: salami, coppa, air-dried ham
Plain salt: sea, rock, pickling	Sodium chloride only	Salt beef, salt cod, gravlax, short wet brines for meat that will be cooked

"Pink salt" here does not mean Himalayan pink salt. Himalayan salt is ordinary salt coloured by minerals and contains no nitrite whatsoever. Using it where a recipe calls for curing salt gives no botulism protection at all. The two are sold side by side and confused constantly.

Prague Powder #2 releases its nitrate slowly, converting to nitrite over weeks, which is what a months-long cure needs. Using #1 for a long cure leaves it unprotected in the later weeks; using #2 for bacon leaves residual nitrate in a product that did not need it. They are not interchangeable.

The dose

Cure #1 dosage

2.5 g of Prague Powder #1 per 1 kg of meat.

Equivalently: 1 level teaspoon per 5 lb, which is the figure most American recipes use.

This delivers roughly 156 ppm sodium nitrite, the regulatory maximum for most cured products.

Meat weight	Cure #1
500 g	1.25 g
1 kg	2.5 g
2 kg	5 g
5 kg	12.5 g

DANGER

Weigh curing salt on a scale accurate to 0.1 g. Never measure it by eye, by pinch, or by spoon-approximation.

Sodium nitrite is toxic above roughly 200 ppm in finished meat, which is only a little above the 156 ppm working dose. The human LD50 is around 0.2 g per kg of body weight, meaning quantities that would fit in a teaspoon are dangerous to a small child.

Three specific hazards, all of which have caused real poisonings:

It looks like salt. Prague Powder is dyed pink specifically so it cannot be mistaken for table salt, and that dye is a safety device, not decoration. Keep it in a clearly labelled container, never decanted into an unmarked jar, and never in a salt cellar.

Keep it away from children, and out of reach, exactly as you would a household chemical. A child eating a spoonful of curing salt is a medical emergency.

Never scale up "for luck". More cure is not safer. The dose is a maximum as well as a minimum, and doubling it does not double the protection, it produces meat that is genuinely poisonous.

If you have no scale accurate to 0.1 g, do not use curing salt. Salt-cure and cook instead, or use another preservation method from this domain.

Salt, separately from the cure, is typically 2 to 3% of the meat weight for an equilibrium cure. The Cure #1 is in addition to that, not instead of it.

Dry curing

Salt and cure rubbed directly onto the meat, which then draws out its own moisture.

Weigh the meat. Everything follows from this number.
Weigh the salt and the cure against that weight.
Rub the mixture over every surface, working into any crevices, folds and around any bone.
Place in a non-reactive container, plastic or glass, never bare aluminium or iron, or in a vacuum bag.
Refrigerate at 2 to 4°C for the calculated time.
Turn it daily and redistribute any liquid that comes out.
Rinse briefly at the end if the recipe calls for it, and pat dry.
Rest it uncovered in the fridge for a day. This forms the pellicle, the tacky surface layer that smoke adheres to.

Wet curing

The meat sits in a brine. Better for large or awkward joints, and for anything you want to stay moist.

The complication: you must account for the total weight of meat plus brine when calculating the cure, not the meat alone, because the nitrite distributes through both.

For anything thick, an injection brine, pumped into the muscle with a curing syringe, is how commercial hams avoid a cured outside and a raw middle. Without it, a large joint in brine can take weeks and can spoil at the centre before the cure arrives.

The equilibrium method

The method worth using, and the one that makes home curing genuinely safe rather than approximate.

Traditional curing buries meat in excess salt for a set time and relies on judgement and rinsing to stop it becoming inedible. Over-salting is easy and under-curing is invisible.

Equilibrium curing puts in exactly the salt and cure you want in the finished product, and then waits for it to distribute evenly.

Weigh the meat.
Calculate: salt at 2 to 3% of that weight, Cure #1 at 0.25% (2.5 g/kg).
Apply all of it, seal in a vacuum bag or tight container.
Refrigerate until it has equalised throughout.

Why it is better:

It cannot over-salt. There is no excess to draw in, so leaving it an extra week does no harm.
The dose is exact and known, rather than depending on how much was rinsed off.
It is forgiving on timing, which matters in a household with other things going on.
It is repeatable. Same numbers, same result, every time.

Time, and why thickness governs it

Rough cure times, equilibrium method, fridge at 2 to 4°C

Cut	Thickness	Time
Fish fillet, gravlax	20 to 30 mm	24 to 48 hours
Pork belly, bacon	40 to 50 mm	7 to 10 days
Pork loin	60 to 80 mm	10 to 14 days
Beef brisket, salt beef	60 to 80 mm	10 to 14 days
Whole ham, bone in	150 mm+	Several weeks, injection brine advisable

Thickness governs the time, not weight. Salt moves inward at roughly 25 mm per week in a fridge-temperature cure. Two thin pieces cure far faster than one thick piece of the same total weight.

Once cured, the meat is ready to be cooked, cold smoked or hung. If it is going to be cold smoked, the cure is not optional and nitrite is not optional, for reasons set out on smoking food.