Any tips on curing a pork loin? I did one awhile a year or so ago and it turned out really well, but can't remember really how I did it. Local grocery chain has pork loins for $1.38/lb. I did use the iSmokeHogs cure app for getting the ratio. I plan on getting at least a 10 lb one and getting it cut into thirds, maple syrup on one section, brown sugar on another, and keeping the other plain. I don't know how much syrup or brown sugar to use though. Thinking I smoked for a couple of hours at 150 and then let it cool completely (overnight). TIA!!
My basic formulation is this...
All of this in relation to the weight of the meat ( and if you had liquids, in relation to liquid weight plus the weight of the meat )
2% salt
1.5% sugar
0.192% Cure #1 (( that yields 120 parts per million added Nitrate, USDA limit/requirement)... 0.25% Cure #1 is a very common amount too, which is about 156 PPM ))
other spices can be added more or less to your own desires... I start at about 0.5% dry spices, such as pepper, Cayenne, rosemary, etc... you can make very good bacon with just 0.2% black pepper... anything more is just getting fancy.
Something I've been trying to do recently is to make it all add up to 4% total... But it's proving to be a little tricky and I'm not sure it's worth it... with 2% salt, 1.5% sugar, and ~0.2% Cure #1, that totals 3.7%... Leaving 0.3% for spices... Which can easily be done, but it limits you on how creative you can easily get with spice content...
But let me try and explain why I like the 4% total idea... first let me be clear on what my formulation would be...
2% Salt
1.5% sugar
0.192% Cure #1
0.308% pepper ( or some combination of dry spices)
So, lets say I have 4000 grams of pork belly...
I mix up 80 grams of salt, 60 grams of sugar, 7.68 grams of cure #1, and 12.32 grams of pepper ( or combination of dry spices). This all adds up to 160 grams of my personal cure mixture... I would apply it to pork belly ( or other pork ) at a rate of 4%...
So, if I cut my pork belly up into hunks, I'd weigh one of the hunks, multiply that weight times 0.04 and I'd know how much of my cure mixture I'd need to apply to that single piece of pork belly... If it was a 1000 gram piece I'd put 40 grams of my cure mixture in a shaker jar I have, and then begin to sprinkle that cure on the pork... I'd do it as evenly as I could, and I could see how much cure I have left in the shaker, ( because it's clear ) and when I was out of cure in my shaker, I'd know I had the correct amount of cure on that hunk of pork. The even number percentage just gives me math that's a little easier to work with... also, if I make my cure consistently at some set percentage, if I have some left over, I can save it for my next cure... Anyway, this is what I've been doing lately, not sure it's worth the hassle, because with a calculator, i could multiply 0.041 just as easily as I can multiply by 0.040, ( or whatever my total percentage works out to be... but this should give you an idea of how I go about doing my cure(s).
