sudsandswine
Quintessential Chatty Farker
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2012
- Location
- Kansas City
I'm looking at a DIY cure for corned beef - actually in this case, corned pork butt for pastrami. Referring to the trusty "Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages" book, it says I need 4.2 oz of cure#1 for 1 gallon of water, and the amount of cure #1 scales linearly based on the volume of water you need...unsurprisingly. I'm planning to corn a pork butt to make a "pastrami pork butt" a la JasonTQ and I determined I need 1.5 gallons of water to sufficiently cover the 8lb butt in the non reactive vessel I'm using....so ~6.3oz of cure #1...sound right?
The calculators I've used based on the thickness of ~4.5" say it may take 19 days in the cure, which I guess is based on ~1/4" per day of penetration. So my question(s) are if I choose to inject some of the brine to speed up the cure, do I need to adjust the amount of cure/salt or is it pretty much still going to achieve equilibrium and I just need to make sure the cure:water ratio is correct? I'm used to using cure #1 in small amounts for dry cures and I understand that only so much of the brine on a % basis will be pulled into the meat but going from a couple teaspoons to 6.3oz (176 grams) of cure #1 is a lot to me.
The calculators I've used based on the thickness of ~4.5" say it may take 19 days in the cure, which I guess is based on ~1/4" per day of penetration. So my question(s) are if I choose to inject some of the brine to speed up the cure, do I need to adjust the amount of cure/salt or is it pretty much still going to achieve equilibrium and I just need to make sure the cure:water ratio is correct? I'm used to using cure #1 in small amounts for dry cures and I understand that only so much of the brine on a % basis will be pulled into the meat but going from a couple teaspoons to 6.3oz (176 grams) of cure #1 is a lot to me.