dry rub slab

[Fueling Around]

Remove the carriage (the slide part) and you can easily slice oversize meats such as a partially frozen slab of bacon. I will add a piece of UHMW poly to the rails in the future.

 

[TARM]

I manually freehand the slicer too. Will be getting a full size 12 hobart sometime after thanksgiving. Maybe a Christmas gift. At least for me the deeper you get into cured aged meats a good deli slicer becomes almost a necessity. Hobart has as a great parts supply line .

 

[Fueling Around]

Sliced the low salt (0.5%) slab tonight.
Cured the same as the 1.5% salt slab in the same time.

Sorry for the sideways view. Tried to rotate and it went 180° so gave up.
Vac packed in 8 oz packages and sent to the freezer.

 

[TARM]

Yes if you use cure 1 the salt % is almost irrelevant for refrigerated meats if all your looking for is the change in meat.

I personally like more salt % but its great as each can dial to their preference.

Those slices look great and certainly have the color to show full cure.

I also believe even with a equalibrium dry cure at least 25% of the salt is not absorbed. At least at dry cures of over 2%. If you take the sodium content of store bought bacon and factor salt is only 36-40% by weight you can see most store bacon has less than 1.5% close to 1-1.2%. But this is the actual amount in the meat per lab test. Just taste the salinity of this versus even 2.25%, 2.5% with cure 1s sodium. With just a cold water rinse of 3-5 mins its not near the saltiness of taste to these store bought. Water content is irrelevant as its cooked out given the thickness. If you desolve salt in just enough water to a saturated solution you would hardly notice the thin film on the meat if applied. That tacky film we are left with before rinsing has a good amount of salt left in it. I dry cure for 14+ days so there is no fluid in the vac bags. I still play with herbs spices and salt % as I am always trying new things and can not help but want to improve ones I already really like.