TripleG
Making your own bacon recipe is an easy process. For each kg of meat, use 1.9g of cure1 to get 120ppm sodium nitrite. Then decide how salty and sweet you want. I do 2.5% salt and sugar both, so 25g of each per kg meat. Add whatever other flavors you want. Coat meat and cure. Done. If you want to use a brine and soak for weeks using equilibrium, add water weight to meat for calcs. If you inject, you’re supposed to also use sodium erythorbate.
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However, if you still want info on this formula from the FSIS Inspectors Handbook, then:
This is a calculation for any ingredient, to figure how much to add to a brine injection batch, to achieve a desired ppm or Parts Per Million.
So, if you were making bacon in such large quantities that for some reason you wanted to use straight sodium nitrite, instead of the cure1 salt/sodium nitrite 6.25% mix, this is a way to add correct amount so you don’t poison folks.
Bacon is allowed a max of 120ppm of sodium nitrite. Let’s say you plan on injecting brine into meat to increase the “uninjected green weight” by 20%, a common amount, then tumbling and smoking. This formula lets you figure how much NaNO2 to put in brine, so you don’t end with more than 120ppm in meat. Just replace all words with your amounts, ppm with 120 or less, and solve.
Good luck 🙂 if you want some examples of these calcs all spelled out, for someone making their own bacon recipe, search up one of my bacon posts.
Edit, had some more time:
Lets say you are going to inject and tumble bellies. You will inject them with brine to 120% their start weight, so 20% inject. So a 10 lb belly you injeect to weigh 12 lbs, NO MORE. How much NaNO2 do you add to brine? Let’s say you’re making 100 lbs brine, enough to make 500 lbs bacon at 20% inject:
120ppm = [(lbs nitrite) x 0.20 x 1,000,000] / 100
Rearranging,
Lb nitrite = 120 x 100 / 200,000 = 0.06
Who knows what 0.06 of a pound is, which is why you should use kg instead. If you were naking 100kg of brine, you would add 60g of nitrite. I think, bit am not responsible for math errors on this quick post, you must do own math.
Hope that helps 😉
