Call me super cheap, (I just think of myself as frugal) but I'm just wondering if I'm the only one who has done this. I got pretty tired of paying high dollar for commercially produced curing salts. Both #1 and #2.
For one thing I have twenty some pounds of food grade potassium nitrate left over from back when I was active in the Pyrotechnicians Guild International, and I haven't much use for it these days thanks to some dumb assed laws that were drafted post 9/11.
Then as luck would have it, while surfing the net one day I found a two pound bottle of USP sodium nitrite on Ebay one for less than five dollars. So I bought that and weighed out the proportions for Instacure #1 and #2 using Morton's Kosher Flake Salt for the salt according to the proportions detailed in "The Sausagemaker".
I dissolved each mixture in water on the stove and added red food coloring to the #1 and blue to the #2, then poured each into Pyrex baking pans and set them in a warm oven to evaporate the water overnight. (the color is added simply to identify them) I scraped both pans the next day to harvest the cure. I've been using that first batch for over two years now and still have plenty left over. I figure that $5 investment in pure nitrite could produce enough cure for about 10,000 pounds of meat. In other words by the time I die there would still be 99% of what I have leftover!
Hell I figure I have enough for everyone if anyone is interested
For one thing I have twenty some pounds of food grade potassium nitrate left over from back when I was active in the Pyrotechnicians Guild International, and I haven't much use for it these days thanks to some dumb assed laws that were drafted post 9/11.
Then as luck would have it, while surfing the net one day I found a two pound bottle of USP sodium nitrite on Ebay one for less than five dollars. So I bought that and weighed out the proportions for Instacure #1 and #2 using Morton's Kosher Flake Salt for the salt according to the proportions detailed in "The Sausagemaker".
I dissolved each mixture in water on the stove and added red food coloring to the #1 and blue to the #2, then poured each into Pyrex baking pans and set them in a warm oven to evaporate the water overnight. (the color is added simply to identify them) I scraped both pans the next day to harvest the cure. I've been using that first batch for over two years now and still have plenty left over. I figure that $5 investment in pure nitrite could produce enough cure for about 10,000 pounds of meat. In other words by the time I die there would still be 99% of what I have leftover!
Hell I figure I have enough for everyone if anyone is interested