So there is salt in the celery powder, and you apply additional salt?
Salt in celery salt and in pink salt is used as a carrier for the celery powder or synthetic nitrates/nitrites respectively because the amount is so small. This aids in mixing it and not getting too much. Using pure celery powder or ni/na powder would be very difficult to do, especially in small batches.
The other salt is the salt used in the recipe - this is where one controls the amount of salt as the amount of salt in the celery salt or pink salt is small.
Is the celery salt substituted 1:1 for pink cure salt, or do you have to use more?
How much you use depends on the type of product. The company, Florida Food Products, has spec sheets for this. This part is regulated and not something that one plays with in the formulations.
How long do you leave the rub on the belly ?
Three days is the bare minimum.
Seven days is good.
I like it longer.
BUT it depends greatly on the thickness of the meat. For thin pieces like belly it can be fast, as per above. For whole muscle things like hams without any pumping it could take much longer. This is why they do injecting for a lot of cures. I've experimented with injecting years ago but don't do it for this as the belly is thin enough to transmit the cure and spices quickly.
Is your maple flavor a dry/powder ingredient, and where do you source that?
I'm using real Vermont maple syrup rather than a maple flavoring. I get it from my next door neighbor at the moment, sometimes from another fellow also close buy.
I tried using maple sugar instead of maple syrup but I like the maple syrup better. Interestingly it is still technically a dry rub even though it is syrup. That is what the labeling division said to use for terminology. I had not expected that. It was another one of the learning points in the process.
I've contemplated incorporating dried molasses into my rub.
Worth trying. For us maple syrup is the local sugar. In other parts of the country it would be molasses, etc.
I went to the FLA food product website. I can't quite find my way around. Your article stated the cherry is mixed in the celery powder, correct? Is the cherry from the dried fruit or wood?
Fruit.
I'm curious what the purpose of the cherry powder is, for a chemical purpose or flavor?
It reacts with the ni/na like sodium ethorbate in the pink salt recipes.
I just don't do your volume of course and would rather not experiment on my precious bellies unnecessarily.
When I started experimenting I used the trim pieces off my bellies for a while to keep down my cost of experimenting. Those were the first couple dozen tests or so. Then once I felt I had it working I moved on to small (1lb) bellies for more testing.
Walt, I just read your article. You are going to love learning real smoking.
My son and I are looking forward to learning how to smoke. In our butcher shop we have a space set aside for a small initial smokehouse which we'll use for a few years and then eventually we plan to build a much larger smoke house in another space that is set aside. The latter will be big enough to smoke whole hogs.
Go with cold smoking if you can.
The plan is to have the ability to do all three types. Being able to bring our smoked hot dogs in house is one of our long term goals. They are RTE non-shelf-stable which is a whole other level of HACCP.
Smoke flavor is next. I like pecan and mesquite, hickory and apple, maple and apple. Apple works anywhere, not so with maple. Both maple and mesquite are smooth and sweet. Hickory is strong, pecan less so but fuller flavor, it is also a hickory yet not called that much.
Interesting. Thanks!
Thanks for posting this article & information. I've never "cured" meat but I would like to do so in the future. so I found your article very helpful in explaining what the difference is, and how you addressed the issue. Congrats on your success in developing your recipe. It can be hard to do that, as pig in a poke pointed out that wasting precious pork bellies on experimenting is not what most of us want to do.
Aye, that's why I started out experimenting with trim pieces. Don't want to waste good belly...!
-Walter