CliveUK

So the small piece begun on 30-May has now lost 30% weight after 30 days drying using my repurposed wine fridge & dehumidifier (12C and 70-75% RH). It was cut into for today's lunch and made a lovely centrepiece to a platter of mixed salume (along with chorizo and n'duja).

There's not a lot to see. I'm using a 30cm wide under-counter wine fridge (for now), so space is a bit tight. The white cable is the mains supply and the fridge door closes onto it (slightly compressing the door seal), so I haven't had to make any holes or permanent alteration to the fridge. It terminates in one half of an in-line connector, and the other side is connected to the power in wires to the controller. It has two pairs of switched power out wires (one for temperature control and the other for humidity control). The temperature control is not currently required (because I can set the fridge's thermostat, directly), so both pairs run to a female three pin outlet (with the temperature control pair safely terminated, inside). The dehumidifier has its power supply/transformer plugged in to the outlet and the only control on the dehumidifier (an on/off switch) is left permanently 'on', so that the controller takes over the switching function. Operation is simple. The desired humidity range (min to max) can be set in increments of 0.1%. I currently have it cutting in at 75% and dropping out again at 70%. The sensor is connected to the controller via another cable and can be placed anywhere within 1.5m of the controller. So far, there is only a tiny bit of water in the dehumidifier (but the weather has been warm and dry), but if I watch the controller, I can see that the RH occasionally gets to 75%+, and then the dehumidifier runs for a minute or two to bring it back to 70% before cutting out again. The RH overshoots (presumably due to the lag in the sensor measurement) but only slightly, but the RH soon creeps up again (within a minute or so) back to within my chosen range. If the setup proves durable I'll probably look for a 2nd hand larder fridge that I can adapt as a more ambitious project. I'll connect the fridge compressor to the controller for temperature control (overriding the built-in thermostat) and probably drill small holes through the rear to keep the cables out of sight/tidy. I've spent £50 on the controller and dehumidifier, and the whole project might give me change out of £100 if I find a suitable fridge. The second picture is of the small piece of rolled pancetta that has been drying for 10 days. It is at just under 85% of the original weight, so about half way to my 70% target. It is ready to have the strings retied to keep the roll tight.

After a week, I can report that the controller seems to be working well. A small piece (450 g) of dry-cured streaky bacon has lost 20% of its starting weight, and a larger piece of rolled pancetta (c700 g) has lost 15% weight in the same time. I changed the controller settings to cause the dehumidifier to cut in at 75% RH and drop out again at 70%. I haven't had to spend very much to get some control over drying rate, so will go ahead and begin some bresaola and salami in the coming days. My only reservation is over the longevity of the controller and associated dehumidifier. I'm surprised to see just how volatile the RH is from minute to minute and how short is the cycle between the dehumidifier cutting in and out again. Will it go the distance ...

I have wired up the controller and have it working. Experimentally, I have set the threshold at which the dehumidifier comes on to 70% RH, and it cuts out again at 65%. I've a piece of bacon gone into the fridge today, and it will be interesting to compare the rate of weight loss with some active control of humidity. I have the fridge at 12C, and I'm not really sure what a good average RH would be at that temperture. I'm aware, in general terms, that as temperature drops the RH rises and I've read several suggestions for suitable ranges to avoid over dry conditions, but they often don't mention any particular temperature. Is anyone aware of a rule of thumb or source of reliable guidance - I don't want to waste good meat! BTW, the controller was easy to wire up, and having settled down, it is showing very similar readings to my separate temperature & humidity monitor, so either they are both rubbish, or they are both about right...

No, I hadn't seen that - interesting. I found it refreshing to hear anyone from the Americas admitting that curing might occur without nitrites in backward places like Europe. Traditional methods are not easily reduced to a spreadsheet formula: 'if you are dry curing do this, and if you are wet curing, do that'. I am still finding my own way in this hobby - so no one should take advice from me, but my instinct is to question the wisdom of any dogmatic approach, and then to read more widely.

I've ordered the same dehumidifier (but differently badged) - it should come, today, along with the controller, so I should soon have an idea of whether I can get the control I'm seeking.

I guess any of us can only do the best we can with the stuff we can source (within our budget). I've ordered a Kelotek KT100 controller (only £21), so if it's a disaster, I can just chuck it out. I'll use it with a similarly inexpensive (but small) thermo-electric peltier dehumidifier. The controller can power appliances up to 10A, directly, so I won't need any separate relays or anything else besides a bit of flex to wire them together. Time will tell whether it works, but it's pretty disappointing to have to abandon a piece after 28 days because it just isn't drying and I'm losing the battle against unappetising looking moulds ...

I've cut my losses, literally, and sliced the piece into lardons for freezing as a cooking ingredient, having trimmed up the ends and made sure that the rest smelled sweet. After another 4 days since last weighing it, it had only lost 1% more weight, and was plainly never going to work as a salumi. So I'm thinking of getting a combined temperature/humidity controller and a small dehumidifier. I can already set temperatures outside the normal fridge range as I'm using a wine fridge, and with a humidifier inside, plugged into the controller, I can get some control over the humidity - there won't be much room left, but if I get good results, I'll trade up to a full-sized fridge and override the built-in thermostat by plugging the fridge into the controller, too.

I began curing a 725g piece of pork belly 26 days ago, using Prague Powder #1 mixed with common salt at the usual rate of 2.75%, with the right level of added Saltpetre to give me the equivalent of #2, and some additional common salt to bring the total salt level up to 4%. I was aiming for air-drying the cured pork to 70% of the original weight, for eating raw. It was cured for 12 days, and has been tightly rolled and tied and wrapped in a layer of clean muslin in a wine fridge at 12C for the last 14 days, but it is proving to be incredibly reluctant to give up moisture, being still at 90% of its starting weight. Meanwhile, it is starting to show signs of white moulds (which look perfectly healthy: it's on the same shelf as a chorizo of slightly older vintage which has a significant bloom of white mould and is nearly ready to eat (at 73% of its starting weight)). I'm concerned about the pancetta, though, as there are signs of a sticky wetness oozing from the sides. It smells fine, but I'm doubtful that I have a success on my hands! I have an inexpensive temperature & humidity meter, and the temperature is spot on at 12C, with the relative humidity varying somewhat between 70-85% - probably too high. I was hoping to have a go at a humidity controlled drying fridge later in the year, but wonder whether anyone has any thoughts on my present work-in-progress. Should I cut my losses and start again, or is there anything I can do to save/salvage what I've got?

Thank you for taking the trouble to reply further. Yes, I guess we are really talking about two different things: I don't want my bacon to share any characteristics with the general commercial product. I'm sure it must be possible to buy good bacon produced commercially, but I've no ready access to any, and I doubt I'd want to pay the asking price, when it's so easy to make. So when I use the term dry-cure, I only do so to differentiate it (by method) from brine-cured bacon (and commercial 'injection' cures are really a species of that latter family, I guess). Typically, my finished bacon (at the point I slice and vac pac it) is at 80-85% of the meat's starting weight, and I won't smoke it until it is. I'm prepared to believe that the white foaming substance that comes from the commercial product is mostly added water, but modern pork production produces 'wetter' meat than in times past anyway, and I want to reduce the water content of the meat significantly. The use of 'abundant' salt, turning that water to brine and then tipping it away, achieves that aim nicely, and while I accept that it is something of a lottery as to just how much salt you end up with in the finished bacon, it certainly isn't the whole 2 1/2 lbs to 12 lbs of meat (along with the 1 oz of saltpetre), because a very high proportion of it is tipped away. So I can say with confidence (but without being able to measure it), that I don't have 35x the permitted level of nitrates when I follow Grigson's recipe, but I cheerfully accept that I probably have a level which would not be permitted in a commercial product. I haven't tasted 'ship's bacon' either, but within my own lifetime, I know of smallholders that would kill a pig in late Autumn, and keep their own flitches of bacon on hooks in the larder until at least early Summer. It's dry, yes, but it isn't desiccated to the point of being unpalatable - quite the reverse. It has a depth of flavour and a texture that makes you smile from ear to ear. To be honest, I can't see any point in producing a facsimile of commercial bacon, needing to be eaten in 2-3 weeks. If the only thing I'm saving is the 10% added water (and about half the direct cost), I just wouldn't bother. It seems to me that what most modern recipes describe as bacon is really petit sale - which I also make myself. I cure slices of pork belly (just the ordinary inexpensive supermarket ones) with a mixture of aromatized salt with saltpetre, using salt at the rate of 5% of the weight of meat. I seal the mixture in a vac pac and put it in the bottom of the fridge for 2-3 weeks. It would be too salty for my taste at 5%, but is simmered in a generous amount of water (changed for fresh after it has first boiled and no longer producing scum) and then cooked for 60 minutes or so. What emerges is full of flavour and not excessively salt, but I wouldn't fry or grill it: it's far too wet.

Thank you for your detailed and helpful reply. A couple of things: I don't think that's really fair to the method. Lamb (River Cottage) is against using either nitrate or nitrite additives in principle (if I understand him correctly) and he has plenty of recipes where the salt content is in the 3-5% range, and there's no suggestion that you need 25% in bacon - and it plainly is mostly poured away, again, as salt-saturated brine. It's a method/technique that predates his own recipe and there are plenty of examples to be found, although most of them use saltpetre in conjunction with common salt. I wouldn't use salt to sugar at 1:1, but the use of sugar to counteract the hardening effect of the salt is also a well-known technique. It interests me that Grigson's recipe only has 1 oz sugar (exactly the same ratio as salt to saltpetre (40:1), and most published recipes suggest a quantity somewhere in between. I use 2:1 - a nice 'sweet cure'. But I remain troubled by suggestions (widely duplicated across lots of 'modern' recipes) that bacon doesn't keep. Ship's bacon would keep 2 years or more (but was probably almost unbearably salty) and a cottager's bacon would certainly last six months. I'm currently eating a drycured ham and some bresaola that were already a month old at for Christmas and they are both still fabulous. I keep my cured meats in a fridge at 12C, so I'm not suggesting the conditions of a modern centrally heated house, but you said: Which I take to endorse the idea that bacon has a shelf life of 2-3 weeks. Some premium hams are cured and matured for several years before anyone cuts into them (and they're not stored under refrigeration, nor, to be fair, in a centrally heated house) and no one thinks that odd. To play Devil's Advocate: if 'modern' bacon only keeps 3 weeks, it hasn't been fully cured. Nitrites aside, it probably doesn't have enough salt content (and probably too high a water content) to be safe [after 2-3 weeks of refrigeration]. But perhaps I misunderstand? For my own purposes, I cure and smoke meat for flavour and texture, and not for long-term preservation; but given the time it takes to cure, air-dry, smoke and mature my bacon or salume, I want the product to last a decent while. I don't want to be needing to eat it up before it goes off, nor to waste my efforts by resorting to freezing with the inevitable loss of quality resulting from the freezing process. It seems an odd thing to advocate. Again, thanks for the opportunity to discuss these issues.

I started my own curing because commercial (supermarket) bacon was expensive, and yet spewed forth horrible white foam in the presence of heat, while shrinking to nearly nothing and tasting of nothing at all. Twenty years ago, I didn't find any useful information about the seemingly mysterious proprietary curing mixtures (Prague / Instacure) and no one (then) was worried about a link between nitrates and cancer, and I settled on some very old recipes that used saltpetre (alone) in conjunction with common salt. The formula that stuck with me was Jane Grigson's (in Charcuterie & French Pork Cooking, 1967) that mixed saltpetre at the rate of 1 oz to 2 1/2 lbs common salt (1:40 or 2.5%), saying that such a quantity would cure 12 lbs of meat. The method I have followed for years and years has been to rub quite generous amounts of such a mixture (including sugar and spices) over the surface of either belly or loin in a small food-grade polythene box (ie not vacpacked), and to allow the salts to draw moisture from the meat (lots of it, particularly for the first 3/4 days), and to pour off that liquid and renew the salt with more. Over 7 days, I use between 25-35% of the starting weight of the meat (!) and then the meat is rinsed, dried for several days, smoked and later sliced. I tend to vacpac the sliced bacon, to avoid oxidation, and it emerges dry, NOT too salty (although I do like well-seasoned food) and with a sheen that is very, well, bacon-like. I don't eat much of it: it's an occasional treat, but it's good bacon. I recently did a review of recipes available online (in places like this forum) circulating between curing enthusiasts, and find that such an approach horrifies. Instead, meat is vacpacked with the same proportion of curing salt that I would use in sausage-making: 2-3%, with a relatively tiny quantity of nitrite and no nitrate at all. I don't doubt that such curing produces safe meat, but can't see how it deals with all that unwanted liquid, nor why I read 'eat within 2-3 weeks, or freeze' recommendations. Bacon used to hang, all winter, from a hook in the larder and keep perfectly for months... Is there a middle way? Steven Lamb, in the River Cottage Curing Book adopts a similar basic technique to mine (but doesn't use nitrites/nitrates, at all), but his basic cure calls for 500 g common salt + 500 g sugar + spices for 2 kg meat: rubbed on, poured off and repeated. HIs is a 'modern' recipe, but an old-fashioned technique. Obviously, only a tiny proportion of all this salt is being actually absorbed in the meat or it would be impossible to eat (and it isn't) - and yet the basic approach seems to be completely rejected by most curers. I wondered about trying a hybrid technique: dosing the meat with plenty of salt/sugar (no additives) for a couple of days, first, to draw out all that excessive moisture, and THEN applying a small quantity of cure (perhaps made up with Instacure #1) in a sealed pouch for the remainder of the curing duration, to control the total salt absorption, and to avoid excessive amounts of nitrites. Any thoughts, either on that proposition, specifically, or the general gulf between the two basic approaches?