Hello!
I have a batch of bacon which I've been curing in bags in the fridge. In all, I have 8 slabs weighing 4-6 lbs each in four separate bags. After rubbing each slab down thoroughly with my curing mix, I placed two slabs in each bag meat-side to meat-side, flipping and agitating the bags daily.
Yesterday, after curing 10 days, I had planned to take everything out and smoke it all. I removed a slab from one bag and sliced a few test strips. The slab itself looked, smelled and felt amazing (nice and firm) but after test frying I noticed that there was a thin uncured "vein" of meat between two layers of fat. On closer inspection of the slab, I could see the uncured meat as a thin pink zone in an otherwise well-cured hunk of belly. So, not having experienced this before (using this method, my bacon has always been cured in 7-10 days) I put the bag back in the fridge after overhauling all the bacon by turning them fat-side to fat-side in the bags. I'm hoping to stretch the curing time out now, but I have never gone longer than 10 days using this method before. They will be 11 days as of today.
My question is this:
Using cure #1, what is the maximum time I can allow my bacon to cure like this?
Thanks for reading!
I have a batch of bacon which I've been curing in bags in the fridge. In all, I have 8 slabs weighing 4-6 lbs each in four separate bags. After rubbing each slab down thoroughly with my curing mix, I placed two slabs in each bag meat-side to meat-side, flipping and agitating the bags daily.
Yesterday, after curing 10 days, I had planned to take everything out and smoke it all. I removed a slab from one bag and sliced a few test strips. The slab itself looked, smelled and felt amazing (nice and firm) but after test frying I noticed that there was a thin uncured "vein" of meat between two layers of fat. On closer inspection of the slab, I could see the uncured meat as a thin pink zone in an otherwise well-cured hunk of belly. So, not having experienced this before (using this method, my bacon has always been cured in 7-10 days) I put the bag back in the fridge after overhauling all the bacon by turning them fat-side to fat-side in the bags. I'm hoping to stretch the curing time out now, but I have never gone longer than 10 days using this method before. They will be 11 days as of today.
My question is this:
Using cure #1, what is the maximum time I can allow my bacon to cure like this?
Thanks for reading!