Salt Curing Meat at Home | Food Security Skill Everyone Needs

Hey everyone, welcome back. Today I am super excited to share with you how you can preserve meat forever with just one ingredient. The only thing that you need to make your meat shelf stable and preserved for all of eternity is some good quality salt. This is not a new concept. We can trace 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 inhospitable environment to bad bacterias such as Listeria and creating a hospitable 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, bin of some type to do your curing in, and 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 sea salt, Himalayan pink salt, sel gris. There's lots of different salts, 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 a really thick piece of pork belly and it still has all the fat on so it's going to give us a definitely a different product than that skinny little guy will. They're both going to be equally delicious and we use the exact same method to cure both pieces. 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 salt box method. It has been no fail for me so far on whole muscle cures. Nice even little coating of salt all over And that's all it takes to make this beautiful hunk of pork shelf stable for now until all of eternity. Eternity. We're gonna set it in this bus tub. Now I have a bus tub, so this is what I'm gonna 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 gonna work just as well. You can put it on, 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 its 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 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 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 going to 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. So minimum five days up to a week or two when you get to them and then we'll be back for the Welcome back everybody. 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 laid 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. 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 pad 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. I'm just going to put it in the middle here. They also make multi-tined ones for larger pieces like this but they're a little more expensive and 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% of its body weight before you start eating it raw. But this one is going to be like a bacon. I'm going to go hang it up for five days and then start slicing, frying, and enjoying. 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. 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 drier 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 flesh. So this is going to be a lot more tender and moist than I anticipated. We've got a really fatty bacon from that skinny piece and we've got a really meaty lean bacon from our thicker cut. Let's fry these up. You can see that fat 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. 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. Okay. That is super yummy. It is a little bit more toothsome. It's almost like a ham has a lot more fiber to it than 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 running 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. 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 scabbing 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 This video, I think you're really gonna like this one. Give it a look next. Have a great one.