Pink Curing Salt Per Pound of Meat Calculator

When you’re first learning how to cure your own meat, the pile of pink powder in that canister doesn’t look like an ingredient; it just looks hazardous. And there’s a reason it’s dye-colored: If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s something you should hesitate to guess at using your kitchen spoons. Sodium nitrite is far more powerful then most people realize on their first attempt at curing. They also tend to overestimate their skill with eyeballing that level teaspoon. A fraction of a gram make all the difference, the difference between success and failure with a batch of bacon. Whole ounces matter less than fractions of grams. You don’t have to be a chemist to work with it; you do, however, need to have respect for math. There is very little room for error.

You do the math: The calculator above takes care of that part; all you need to worry about is maintaining a cool, sanitary work environment. Depending on your desired nitrite level, it will convert your raw meat weight to exact number of grams of cure required. Simply input amount of beef or pork you’re preparing and it will tell you exactly how much to measure. Why? Different crystal sizes in each brand make volume measurement highly inaccurate. Heaping the spoon may deliver way more nitrite than lightly scooping it. When you weigh instead, there’s no guesswork involved.

Why You Must Weigh Your Curing Salt

Weighing is also important because curing salt is mostly regular salt. This calculator factors that in to help you adjust your total seasoning so the finished product isn’t swimming in brine water.

Do I use Cure #1? Or Cure #2? If you’re going to wait more than just a few days after making your meat until cooking or eating, then Cure #1 (just sodium nitrite) is best. It acts immediately to kill bacteria and preserve color in items you intend to cook shortly after production, such as fresh ham or breakfast sausage. On the other hand, if you’re doing something where you’ll want to preserve it longer, such as dry-cured meats (country ham, salami, etc.), then you should choose Cure #2, which combines both nitrates & nitrites. Because nitrate react more slowly by breaking down into nitrite over weeks or months, it helps preserve dried foods during long curing periods. Either way, you don’t want to use the incorrect cure; it’s either a waste of time by waiting for a result that isn’t coming, or a potential hazard by using up preservation before you need it. The calculator also has an option to toggle between them, note that switching will change total weight slightly due to the different amount of nitrites used.

Another source of confusion for first-time curers is target ppm levels. Ppm refers to parts per million (i.e., milligrams of active nitrite per kilogram of meat). Typically ground meats use a higher level at start-up, since they have greater surface exposure to bacteria; thus targets might be 156 ppm or so. For whole muscle cuts such as bacon, the dense tissue makes it harder for bacteria to get inside, so targets will generaly be lower; perhaps in the 120-ppm range, keeping in mind that it’ll still be cooked prior to consumption. Brined products pumped via validated injection techniques may be as high as 200 ppm. Selecting your treatment technique tells the calculator what kind of dose you want; it will then adjust accordingly so you don’t inadvertently overdose a fragile whole muscle with a ground-meat dose.

Wet cures do change the math dramatically, however, due to retention. When curing with brines, soaking your meat in them or pumping brine into something like a ham, some of that solution runs off. That means if you’re doing the math assuming that your brine solution was used entirely, you’ll probably wind up under-cured, as meat didn’t retain all of it. To adjust for this, there’s an option in the calculator to include a pickup percentage. You guess at what percent of cure remained in the meat, then the calculator tacks on more from the start to compensate. This is a tiny tweak in terms of the interface, yet it has a huge impact in both flavor balance and safety. Since dry rubs are rubbed onto the outside and then migrate inward (without washing away), they assume 100 percent retention.

Now: How precise does scale need to be? Turns out pretty darn precise. A single gram difference between 0.6 grams and 1 gram is huge. Take a look at what rounding up or down does to your ppm with the calculator. If you’re serious about curing meat, get one of these scales (and buy one that can weigh down to 0.01 grams). They’ll give you a sanity check before dumping everything together and save you a world of hassle.

Finally, always refer to these reference tables on the page when working through any common batch size, and don’t use Himalayan pink salt as a substitute; it’s missing some of those key preservation compounds. And whatever you do, don’t trust the spoon. Trust the weight.