#1 salt vs ready cure


 
Len Dennis

Len Dennis

TVWBB Diamond Member
You may or may not know #1 is generally not available in Ontario (other than mail order plus $15-20 shipping) or in 50 lb bags from Canada Compound. The only stuff I can get over the counter is Ready Cure (1% concentration).

My question: can I just use 6x readycure and 1/6 the salt in a recipe/brine that calls for 6% (pink/Prague/sure cure/etc)?

For example, a recipe uses 1T pink salt and 6 lb kosher salt (remember, this is just an example, not real).

Can I use 6 T of ready cure (1%) and 1 lb k.salt?
 
Last edited:
Not exactly. But you should be able to use Martin's calculator and change the cure percentages around from the default for Cure #1 to what you have.
 
And then I found this (conversion) already done for me :D

For some bacon:


The exact recipe I'm using is from monty on Ottawa Foodies. It looks like this for 5 lbs of belly.

1/4 cup non-iodized salt (pickling, kosher, sea)
2 tsp Insta-Cure® (6.25% sodium nitrite)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup

I started by rounding down the 6.25% to just 6 - which was close enough for me to be able to do easy math. And it erred on the side of less nitrite which I felt was safe. But I am no expert by any means. So in order to get the amount of sodium nitrite in the recipe, I had to use 6 times as much Readycure as Instacure. So instead of 2 teaspoons I needed 12 of them! In the case of both of these cures, the remainder of the ingredients is just salt. Actually, Readycure has a bit of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) in it as well, but since it was listed after the sodium nitrite, I knew it was less than 1%. So I chose to just ignore it in my math.

There are 48 teaspoons in a cup. So 12 teaspoons of Readycure is 1/4 cup. But since Readycure is 99% regular salt, that meant I was essentially dealing with just 1/4 cup salt. So that took the place of the 1/4 cup salt in my original recipe. The 2 teaspoons of Instacure in the original recipe are of course 94% salt, so mostly salt. So just adding 2 teaspoons of salt would give me about the same amount of salt as the original recipe.

So I ended up with :

1/4 cup Readycure (12 teaspoons)
2 teaspoon non-iodized salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup
3 cloves garlic

Then there was a second issue to deal with - the original recipe was for 5 lbs of meat, and I was only dealing with 4 lbs. So I used only about 80% of each ingredient - 9 teaspoons readycure, 1 teaspoon salt, and shy of 1/4 cup of the sugars. I also tossed in 3 cloves of garlic for good measure.
Click to expand...


http://www.urbanhippy.ca/making/bacon
 
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