Curing salt (nitrited salt)

Sel nitrité

What it is

For centuries charcutiers used saltpetre without knowing why it worked; in the 1890s German food chemists showed that it was the nitrite bacteria made from it, not the nitrate itself, that fixed the colour and held botulism off. Nitrite was then blended straight into the salt, and the mixture dyed pink so nobody could take it for table salt.

In the kitchen

Dose it by the weight of the meat, never by taste: 20 g of 0.6% nitrited salt per kilo is the standard rate, and that is the total salt, not an addition to it. It turns toxic well before it would taste wrong, so weigh it on a scale that reads to a tenth of a gram and never scale a recipe by eye.

Goes with

Pork Pork belly Beef Black pepper Juniper berry Garlic

Also used with

Natural casings Glucono delta-lactone

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