Hello. Am new to smoking and this forum. Have been doing lots of reading from all those that are so generous to share their experience and insight. Must admit that from those here and from other sources avilable it can be a bit difficult to find consensus on methods and recipes. Have been reluctent to post with questions as i am sure that somewhere the answer exists, am hoping i can get a point in the right direction.
So here are the questions
1) for bacon from belly the salt concentration seems to be about 2-3%. When i do that math i come up with what seems like a crazy amount of salt for the dry cure mix. Example if you have a 2kg belly at 2% salt you would need to add 80g of salt to the cure mix. Have found a couple calculators on line and cant figue the math behind them. Can someone help clarify this for me.
2) using dry cure method and cure #1 at 1 tsp per 5 lbs, the time seems to be 1 day per inch thickness plus two days. However, there is a wide range of cure times from 4 days to 14 days. Get that don't want to under cure but is there other methods of determining cure times of bellies?
3) now to smoking, looks like the body of input favours cold smoking at about 100F for about 12 hours, many folks are adamant that you need to bring final temp to 147-150F. I cant find a soild food safety reason for doing this. So the question is if you cold smoke at about 100F do you need to bring internal temp to 150F and if so why?
Have my first two bellies dry curing along with some pork loin in pops brine. Plan on smoking next weekend, bacon for thanksgiving (for us Canadians).
Many advance thanks for you replies
So here are the questions
1) for bacon from belly the salt concentration seems to be about 2-3%. When i do that math i come up with what seems like a crazy amount of salt for the dry cure mix. Example if you have a 2kg belly at 2% salt you would need to add 80g of salt to the cure mix. Have found a couple calculators on line and cant figue the math behind them. Can someone help clarify this for me.
2) using dry cure method and cure #1 at 1 tsp per 5 lbs, the time seems to be 1 day per inch thickness plus two days. However, there is a wide range of cure times from 4 days to 14 days. Get that don't want to under cure but is there other methods of determining cure times of bellies?
3) now to smoking, looks like the body of input favours cold smoking at about 100F for about 12 hours, many folks are adamant that you need to bring final temp to 147-150F. I cant find a soild food safety reason for doing this. So the question is if you cold smoke at about 100F do you need to bring internal temp to 150F and if so why?
Have my first two bellies dry curing along with some pork loin in pops brine. Plan on smoking next weekend, bacon for thanksgiving (for us Canadians).
Many advance thanks for you replies
