Hello WatwardSwede. I haven't tried this yet but it is on my list to do. Sorry but the picts will not paste or upload. I can e-mail the document with picts if you need it. Hope it helps. Keep Smokin!
Danny
Ingredients
1.5kg piece of belly pork
350g rough sea salt
2 bay leaves, chopped up small
6 juniper berries, squished lightly
2 sprigs of thyme
2 cloves, squished lightly
75g soft brown sugar
Method
Mix together the salt, sugar, herbs and spices in a clean bowl.
Use about a quarter of this mix to coat the bottom of your container. It mustn’t be metal – we use a ceramic roasting dish. If you have something with a lid even better; if you have a large crock with a lid, better still!
Rinse the piece of pork under the cold tap and then pat it dry with a clean muslin or clean tea towel.
Take a handful of the seasoned salt and rub it well, pretty firmly, into the skin side of the pork. Once you’ve done this, turn the meat over and rub the same kind of amount into the flesh side, but do this more gently.
Put your piece of pork, skin side up, on top of the salt in your container and pack in the rest of the salt mix round the sides and over the top.
Put a very clean plate (or boiled bit of wood) on top of the pork and put some weights (not too many, say about 1/2 kg to 1 kg – if you don’t have weights use water in plastic bottles, or tinned food) on top.
Cover it – we wrapped the container in two very clean tea towels, one lengthwise & the other widthwise.
Leave it in a dark, cool place for 3-4 days before checking. You should see that the juices from the meat have combined with the salt to make a dark brine:
(Give it a sniff to find out it’s ok, and check to make sure there aren’t any mouldy bits on the surface of the brine. It should be fine – if the brine does look manky, what I’d do is make up some more of the flavoured salt, remove the pork from the brine, rinse it, dry it, wash out the container with some hot soda solution, and try rubbing it again.)
You could start using it at this point – it will last about a week and will have quite a mild cure.
Or leave it be for longer – it will be done after 8 days and the longer you leave it, the saltier it will get. Jane Grigson mentions that some instructions for petit salé say to leave it for 2-3 months! But she also says that it will be done if you give it 4 days per inch thickness.
We did ours for just under two weeks. And we ended up with something that had been transformed by the salt & sugar: