Dry Curing Pork
This Christmas you may have noticed that charcuterie boards, grazing boards and snacking plates were all the rage.
I jumped on this band wagon because it meant that I didn’t have to cook meals that may or may not be eaten. Also it let us be more flexible with when people ate.
Being the cheap, whole food person I am I balked at the $5/100gram price tag on fancy cured meats and began to wonder if I could perhaps make my own.
After reading a handful of articles, sourcing some curing salt and deciding I was just going to put it in my fridge and hope for the best I set out in search of a pork tenderloin to ruin.
My teenage son was appauled that a perfectly good pork tenderloin turned into a muddy brown log sat in a ziploc in the fridge for days on end. Both of my sons were shocked when I took it out of the ziploc, wrapped it lightly in a beeswax wrap and put it back into the fridge.
This weekend we cut the ends off and had a very tenative taste.
It was delicious.
My younger son immediately asked me to slice him more.
I sadly had to inform him that it wasn’t quite done and was actually still raw.
After posting my project on Instagram a follower informed me that eating raw pork comes with a very real risk of trichinosis. Which is actually more of a risk in wild game or pigs that experienced poor animal husbandry practices. Don’t feed meat scraps to your future meat folks it works out poorly every time.
Since my pork came from a butcher I’m not really worried but it was good to note because I see dry cured game meat jerky in my future.
Basically this was a huge success.
No separate fridge or curing box required. I cured the pork in my regular fridge where I could check it daily. My fridge is kept quite clean and we don’t eat a lot of produce during the winter so there isn’t really a lot happening in there. It did take over a month start to finish so there’s that. And from what I understand the longer I leave it to cure the better the flavour.
This was the recipe for lonzino that I ended up using: https://honest-food.net/gird-your-loins-lonzino/
This was the website that taught me so so much: https://eatcuredmeat.com/how-to-cure-meat-at-home-complete-illustrated-guide/
A friend of mine wants to make salami which means a kitchen party is in my future!
Eat on folks.
Decolonize your diet.
