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Sodium Erythorbate


 
Dustin Dorsey

Dustin Dorsey

TVWBB Hall of Fame
Anyone used this additive in bacon and sausage making? I bought some to try out. It's supposed to accelerate the curing process so you can smoke sausage immediately after adding the cure. Supposedly it also keeps the nitrite from turning into nitrosamine. Also it keeps cheese from discoloring the meat around it.
 
Just digging around I've seen it's added at 0.06% which for a 2000g batch at 1.2 grams. I'm not sure how accurate my scale is at 10ths of a gram but I think it does it.
 
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I have no knowledge of any of this, but my concern would not be the tenths of grams, but the strength/concentration of what you are weighing.
 
I bought it from The Sausage maker which suggests a teaspoon for 10 pounds, so if I use it I'll kind of use that as my sanity check. I usually do batches around 5 lbs. I figure what I measure out should be close to a half teaspoon, roughly, but I'll weight it out.

My current method with cure#1 is to cube up my meat, weigh it, then add my cure and spices and let it sit overnight to let the cure work. Then the next day I grind, mix, stuff. Then I either smoke it the next day or freeze the sausage to cook at a later date ( I tend to prefer smoking at barbecue temps just once). With the.sodium erythorbate you could just add the spices during mixing and you could stuff and smoke right away. Dunno if that necessarily makes a better or worse sausage. There's debate on it from what I can gather.


Also I don't think it has a concentration the way that sodium nitrite has Cure#1 does for instance, but I could be wrong.
 
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I've seen some new information on this via the 2 guys and cooler youtube channel about tasting your sausage after you've added cure. Depending on your process it's a bad idea to cook up and taste the sausage before the cure has had a chance to work. I typically will cure mean overnight before grinding. However if you just add everything including the cure during mixing and then fry up a piece before stuffing you could be exposing yourself to nitrosamines. One way around this is using sodium erythorbate or just waiting overnight for the cure to work. It's probably a super small risk either way but I thought this was interesting. I'll link a video later.
 
This is the video I was referring to. It's a little clickbait-y but good info. It only matters if you use cure. Personally, I'm confident in my salt levels and I rarely do a taste test.
 
Cure works almost instantly.......... What takes the time is diffusion through meat thickness.

When i cure jerky ... You can see the color change before your eyes. If you massage strip of meat around in a ziplock with cure a few minutes a quarter inch thick strip of beef is totally changed color throughout.... In as little as 8 to 10 minutes.

When they make commercial bacon etc they inject with needles that are closely spaced together so that there's very little diffusion distance and the cure is just minutes. They can't afford to take days.

A ground meat like sausage would be virtually instantaneous if it was well mixed.... Danger might be that it's not well mixed.
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I bought some so I'll probably keep using it just to use it up, but I thought it was interesting. Generally I cube up the meat and then season along with the cure and let it sit overnight.
 
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