Making a cured pork loin or Canadian bacon, using a liquid brine Equilibrium Cure, and pumping/injecting meat at same time for cure speed.
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Splitting this off from old thread of mine on same thing but with a dry rub/brine, for easier search and tag future reference.
This has been gone over many times many places, many many folks here do this. I like to document my work as it gives me a good reference for later, so I might as well post it up in case it helps others. I will hit the main points for future readers that this may be their 1st exposure to Equilibrium Curing (will use EC as acronym).
Basically it is a brine cure with the total amount of meat plus liquid calculated for, and the salt/cure1/sugar is just enough that when it all equalizes between meat and liquid, the target amounts are perfect everywhere. This is slower than a high concentrated salt “gradient brine”, but has the benefit you can’t ever overshoot the target salt levels, and can leave it brining extra weeks if needed for your schedule.
The dry rub or dry brine EC is easiest, just rub into meat and dump it in a bag. But meat loses moisture, ends up drier, and it takes 10 to 15 days. If you calculate total ingredients to be spread over the meat plus liquid, you can inject or pump the brine into the meat, put some on outside too, and get a faster cure and juicier final product.
Commercially, I believe they mostly don’t pump an EC brine, but still use a higher concentration brine for even faster curing. But then you have to calc and measure exactly how much gets taken up by the meat to ensure correct final nitrites and salt. Usually 10% of the meat weight can be injected amd held, so they use that for the calculations. In our case, since it is an EC brine, it doesn’t matter if we pump 0% or 20%, since it will all equalize out and the totals are at correct amounts.
The meat takes up almost as much brine, salt and cure, as if it was pure water, but not quite, due to it being mostly water but some is free, some interstitial, some bonded, some inside cells, etc. I use a calculator that takes the properties of meat vs. water into account, made by Dr. Greg Blonder Equilibrium Cure Brine Calculator . There is also a tab that tells you how long you have to wait for it all to equalize, without the internal injection.
That’s the intro info. processhead posted a nice 10% by weight injection on my dry rub thread, great post and info, I will paste some of his info below 🙂