What does it mean to cure a piece of meat? Or what does it mean when a piece of meat is cured?
Curing is a process by which you can preserve meat for longer periods of time. It’s a broad term but covers all the techniques from salting, drying, smoking, to even canning of meats. When you talk about curing at home, usually you’re referring to preserving it with salt and nitrite (commercial curing adds a bunch of other stuff that you won’t have access to). In addition to preserving the meat, it also adds flavor.
So, how do you cure meat at home?
Salting
This is the simplest form of curing and with this technique your goal is meat preservation and not necessarily taste. When you salt meat, it draws out the moisture that bacteria and microbes would need to grow and thrive. When you salt and dry meat, it lets you save it for much longer periods of time. Salt does not kill bacteria, it just stops them or slows them down in growing.
How much salt? 10% is most effective but 6% will kill Clostridium botulinum.
This isn’t the best way to cure meat because the salt will harden the meat and make it, obviously, very salty and dry. So what’s better? Curing.
Curing
Curing is a lot like salting except you add nitrates or nitrites in addition to the salt. The nitrates and nitrites prevent spoilage and help preserve the meat even more. You can use less salt if you add nitrates/nitrites to the mixture.
Nitrates/nitrites also react with the myoglobin in red meat and convert it to nitric oxide myoglobin, which is a very dark red. When you cook it, the nitric oxide myglobin converts to nitrosylhemochrome, which is the pink color you may associate with cured meats. This is similar to the pink ring you associate with smoked meats (explanation of the smoke ring).
That’s what it means for a piece of meat to be cured.
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