Excalibur MRT Sugar Cure directiosn for bacon

[BobK]

Hello All! I have some MRT Excalibur Sugar Cure on hand and was hoping to use it to cure some pork bellies. I see in the directions that this dry rub cure is used to cure meat for about 6 months. I was hoping to find some directions for using it for bacons with a cure time of 5-7+ days. I do see that the Excalibur Dry Rub bacon cure is similar but has 1.09% erythorbate and some bicarb (1%) if I recall correctly. Is there a way to use the MRT cure w/o additions to cure bacons? Should I consider adding the erythorbate to the MRT mix? Any help is appreciated!

[BobK]

OK I see a problem here with using this cure and that is the nitrate in the cure. As I understand it nitrates should not be used in bacon cures. Maybe I answered my own question!

[Jonathon]

BobK and you did it before anyone else could get to it! Now, there IS such a thing as nitrAte bacon but it is a different process. I honestly don’t know how Erythorbate would interact with nitrate…it would speed it up but not a fast enough breakdown to make nitrate cures.

[BobK]

Jonathon thanks for your reply. I’ve given up on using the MRT cure due to the nitrate and will use some of the Sweeter than Sweet cure instead to make a pickle for these first few pork bellies I have ready for curing. I’ve done the math to correct the weight(1.33 lbs) of the cure per gallon to give me 120 ppm ingoing nitrite as per Walton’s bacon pickle recipe. I need to order some more Country Brown Sugar cure for some hams I am going to do and I will add some of the Blue Ribbon bacon cure to give it a try on the pork bellies that are next on the list for processing.