British BBQ Society Forums

I have only had one slice of each and taste wise I couldn't really telly the difference, both parts seemed to have taken the cure well.

I personaly like the skin on so will probably stick to that going forward as an FYI I got myself an Andrew James slicer for £35 so the sliced bacon was nice and thin.

Also found a use for a vaccum sealer

Yes vacuum sealers are a great idea and reasonibly priced. Our meat slicer died a couple of Christmases ago and has yet to be replaced

With regard to rolls of "bags" for your sealer, keep an eye on the JML website they often do a 2-4-1 offer and the bags are the same as Name Brands

Thanks Keith, I'll have a look for those.

Hi UKegger, that looks great - bet it tasted even better There's no reason to worry about using curing salts, they are there to provide safely cured meat and as long as you use them in the correct ratios of cure to meat you'll be laughing. It's normally easiest to mix up a larger batch of salt, sugar and cure#1 to do say 10kg of meat and then use the correct proportion of cure to the weight of the meat.

for example, if your cure#1 was reccomended at 2.5g per kg (it will say on the packet) you could make a batch to cover 10kg by mixing up:

210g salt
115g sugar
25g cure#1

You would have 350g of bacon cure that has the right amount of cure#1 to safely cure 10kg of bacon. It works out as 35g of dry cure mix per kg, so if you have a 2.5kg piece of meat you would use 87.5g of dry cure.

The salt & sugar quantities can be varied to suit your own palate, but the key is to make sure you use the cure#1 at the ratio on the packet.

Jonty,

It tasted great, I have given a number of people tasters and they all loved it, I have even had people ask if I would sell the stuff.

Thanks for the tip on making up a big batch probably something I will do for next time, I found a website that has a spreadsheet for calcualting the meat to salt / cure ratio etc.

I could really get into this curing etc next up is going to be sausage making...