Curing Meat With Salt | Preserving Meat With Salt At Home

[Music] today we're curing meat in the fridge with salt so for this stage of the process you'll need a container that's going to hold your salted meat in the fridge a piece of meat of your choice we chose a pork leg and half a kilo of rock salt because this is the best salt for this type of curing make a bed of salt on the container doesn't have to be too thick as long as it's gonna keep the bottom part of the meat salty and we're gonna put the the fleshy part down yeah now this meat comes already i don't know cut so it's going to help us curing it even better and then you want to add salt on each side of the meat don't worry if it gets a bit messy you can reuse that salt on the same piece of meat now depending on which type of piece of meat you're gonna get make sure that you add salt everywhere yeah so even in this folds and in all of the nooks and crannies it's very important if you want the salt to penetrate and the whole purpose of the salt is to dehydrate the meat take as much of the moisture out and make it an inhospitable place for bacteria and germs to it live in yeah in some parts of the world they even add sugar because sugar removes oxygen so especially in parts of italy where they do the parma hams and stuff they always add brown sugar as well but we're not gonna do that now going for more primitive traditional way of curing with salt make sure that it's everywhere and you can even leave a layer of salt like this on top don't worry about the meat it will not become super salty this again is going to just mummify it yeah he's going to dehydrate it and preserve it and this needs to go into the fridge for 48 hours after 48 hours this is how your meat should look is literally mummified yeah it's very tough see there's very few spots where it's still a bit pink expect a lot of moisture to come out so we measured this it's 200 milliliters this piece of meat was two kilos when we started so that's about 10 percent lost uh of moisture what we're going to do now is take the meat off this tray wash it we want to remove all of this excess salt and then we're going to spice it up and season it with all kind of nice things while the meat is uh draining and drying up you want to prepare your spices now this is up to you guys you know whatever you prefer but we have 20 grams of onion powder 10 grams of chili flakes 20 grams of garlic powder 30 grams of smoked paprika 10 grams of freshly ground pepper got 20 grams of smoked sea salt you can buy this from from the shops and and online as well um just to give it that amazing taste yeah and the last thing we got some italian seasoning like a dry mix of herbs you can just mix it all together don't worry if you spill a bit on your container because we will put the piece of meat on that container to season it just in case there's clumps try to you know break them down by hand so you don't have clusters of seasoning in just one space and all the season just one side of the meat okay that's it that's spicy oh yeah because i forgot to tell you there was also um 15 grams of cayenne pepper so i think that's the thing that just went into my lungs so this is how the piece of meat should look it's shiny because of the fat and also because of the water we didn't drain it like 100 because we need a bit of moisture so that all of this amazing seasoning sticks on it yeah but look at the colors it's tough really you know getting there in the curing process open it up as much as you can because we want to season every single nook and cranny here so we make sure that this piece of meat is going to be as delicious as possible and then it's very simple just take some seasoning and start rubbing it in it may look like a lot but don't worry the meat is only gonna take what it needs same like with the salt and apart from seasoning the meat this is also going to protect it from anything that may be in your fridge that you don't want it to go into your piece of meat because the final resting place when it's all done and rubbed is gonna be in your fridge for another 48 hours and then we're gonna keep it there between one month and three months because we want to cure it properly on the skin as well on the pork skin and the pork fat this is going to be delicious when it's all cured and dehydrated the egg layer thickly everywhere literally try to poke every single piece of meat and then all of this leftover [Music] use it on the top okay now you know prepare yourselves to become a spice monster or a seasoning monster wash your hands and then we're gonna put this puppy back in the fridge but first we're gonna measure it to see what's the final weight on this you're gonna need the container we're gonna put it in the fridge [Music] a scale put it to zero and then you take your final product and you add it on top we're at almost one kilo seven hundred so we're actually we lost a bit more than 200 grams of liquid because probably evaporations and other stuff we need to keep it in the fridge until it loses 35 percent moisture the final desired weight with minus 35 percent weight is going to be 1086 grams so that's one kilo and 96 grams this is our target when we reach this um weight then theoretically our ham should be ready to eat we're gonna put it back in the fridge for 48 hours and after those 48 hours we're gonna tie the meat up with some string and then we're gonna hang it in our fridge so this is why you should have after 48 more hours um it's still a bit juicy so don't worry if you're still losing a bit of moisture that's good the more moisture we lose the better this is gonna cure for the next step you can use any type of twine this is what we have now available so that's what we're going to use and what we want to do is go underneath the first part of the meat and just make a basic knot basic knot but also remember to leave a bit of the twine hanging on this side yeah so this is important for the final stage you want to make a loop like this and with this loop go underneath the meat and go about like one inch and then you want to align the knot with the initial part of the meat like this yeah and just use tension to make this pattern here yeah and you just repeat the same thing you make a loop you put it underneath the meat [Music] take your space about one inch [Music] you tie it down properly and you see what's happening this is like when you do your roast or you hang a ham we're doing exactly that just to keep everything together because next it is going to go into the fridge and hang for a extended period of time if you use the same spices as us it will get a bit messy but trust me it's worth it because it smells amazing okay now we're getting ready for the last two and here you have this overlapping piece of foreskin and i would like to keep it closed so um it marinates and gets softened up and also keeps all of that spice and seasoning and salt inside so it doesn't drip out and then go for the last one [Music] okay and that should be good now what we want to do is turn it on the other side like this so basically you turn it on the other side and you revert from where you started you start at the end with the piece of pore skin here and we want to have enough string to reach this end tie it with a knot and still have something to to hang it with yeah okay so get yourself a nice measurement this should be enough cut the string continue making loops but we want to do it in such a way that's going to keep the meat tight so on the other side we made the knots on this side we just want to go in between each layer like this and just create a very similar pattern to what we've done on the other side don't be afraid to you know move it out a bit and this is a very classic way of tying up a roast or a ham to hang so before we make the final knot you have the initial part that we've done with the loops and then when we flipped it we took that extra piece of twine and we started looping it through the existing pieces of strings and now that we reach the end we're going to make as strong as we can not here and this is going to keep everything together yeah so not like that but try to very slippery try to tie it as tight as possible here and what you want to do now is just use this extra piece of twine and hang it in your fridge somewhere unless you have a cellar or you know like they do it in italy a cold room but we don't have that so what we're going to show you is fridge air dry so here we are it took actually eight weeks now whatever you're gonna check online they say that the curing process especially the drying part is going to take anywhere between four and six weeks but because we've done it all in the fridge it took eight weeks remember if you want it to be safe you want it to lose that 35 of its moisture and that's why we had to wait for so long but i mean look at this beauty he he went to the desired weight which was one kilo and 85 grams and now now it's ready to enjoy so i just wanna remove the string that we use to hang it and as we do that we're gonna see the whole beauty of this piece of meat because this piece of string gives it a very fuzzy look just smells amazing i just want you guys to know that it smells amazing all of those spices the cayenne pepper and the smoked paprika just made this smell fantastic there were some crisps when i was a kid like some chips and they were heavy on the paprika it smells exactly like that so i know it's meat but it imparted so much of the seasoning as it cured so this is the finished product now i just want to cut it in half and see how it looks in the middle because that's the most important thing on the outside the cold air in the fridge has cured it it's very important to see now if in the middle is dried up as much as it has to be and i just want to be honest with you i couldn't control myself in like two weeks ago i cut a tiny bit from here and i had to try it it was delicious then let's see now oh it's dried up i mean this is a really sharp knife okay oh it looks amazing look at this look at that color now i am not an expert when it comes to curing meat actually this is the first experiment that we've done you guys try it you guys let me know in the comments if this is something that you've done if you had success with this but for me knowing what i know about cured meats this is a success and i really want to try it right now it works really well if you have a an electric meat slicer but you know with a good knife you can get a nice piece like this and it smells really good so nice i think it's success you can slice it thinly and enjoy it like that with some i don't know on a cheese board or with some pickles or something like but i think the best way to to to use this type of meat is to season or flavor your dishes so any rice dishes any stews anything that doesn't really have a lot of flavor like peas if you make some peas can have a bit of this meat in it just to give it that amazing flavor and also to impart all of the spices because it is coated in spices and it has plenty of salt so if you cook with this and season your dishes just bear in mind that there's a lot of salt already in this meat so maybe reduce a bit of the of the salt it tastes great it smells great and like this you can keep it safely in the fridge for about two weeks but if you want to extend the shelf life of this meat you can cut it in usable pieces of meat that you know you're going to use for your dishes for your sandwiches for your plates or platters of meat and just either freeze it or vacuum seal it so if you have a vacuum sealer put it in a bag seal it and it can stay in the fridge or if not just freeze it there's not much moisture inside so the freezing process isn't gonna affect the meat too much but again don't leave it there for three years people used to preserve meat like this in the past and even today there's many parts of the world where they still preserve this most people just have one pig for the whole year they sacrifice it in in winter and then they preserve each piece of that pig nothing goes to waste and this is exactly what they would do if i would give you a piece of advice i'm very dirty but hey get yourself a notebook and write down everything write down what works what doesn't work when you start the curing process when you buy it just so it gives you that timeline time frame because this worked for me it took eight weeks in total it's a nice project if anything especially with lockdown after lockdown after lockdown and people having a lot of time on their hands might as well try something like this [Music] uh [Music] that's it for this video thank you very much for watching and being interested in other ways of trying to become more sustainable and learning a lot of things now in the lockdown when we have a lot of time on our hands and if you did find this video useful and helpful we would really appreciate if you hit the like button and subscribe because this year we're gonna do some changes we are really interested in more sustainable way of living we've done some things in the past with the deodorant and dishwasher pills and stuff like that but now we want to focus a lot on the food and how we can preserve it how we can get the most of our food because this is where the medicine is not in pills and in the pharmacy there's a couple of changes happening and i would really like to have you guys along this journey with us see you next [Music] time [Music] la

Channel: Homevert Homesteader

Views: 7,202

Rating: 4.9381442 out of 5

Keywords: Curing meat with salt, curing meat at home, preserving meat with salt, preserving meat, meat preservation, how to cure meat, salt curing, how to cure meat with salt, how do i cure meat, using salt to cure meat, whats a safe way of curing meat, food preservation, food preservation at home, meat (food), charcuterie, easy curing, in the fridge, curing at home, refrigerator curing, simple cured meat, beginners guide, easy, recipe, step by step, homemade, homestead, cured, curing, salt

Id: 0C29BpsJRNg

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021