To salt pork

After two weeks in its tub of salt, my beautiful piece of pork belly is now officially saltpork.

Beautiful saltpork

Salt pork is one of those foods that just about everyone from a pig-raising part of the world would have eaten until about yesterday. This simple and rather humble ingredient was once so common that it was often referred to simply as “pork,” with fresh pork needing to be specified if a recipe called for it. Yet it’s so uncommon today, with refrigeration, better packaging, and the sheer quantity and lower cost of meat making it essentially obsolete. (Of course there is bacon, but that’s really a different product with a different purpose; and even the bacon we get in the store or make ourselves today is not as it used to be.)

Now, given that my desire to make salt pork came from its being used in Auguste Escoffier’s recipe for tomato sauce, I figured I would follow the recipe for it which he helpfully provides. His recipe - #267: Dry Salt Curing - stipulates a mixture in ratio of 40g saltpeter to 1kg coarse salt (in due proportion to the amount of meat being cured, which he doesn’t elaborate on); the pieces of meat are “pierced right through the center with a large needle” (?) and then rubbed with pure saltpeter before being covered in the salt mixture. For each kilogram of salt, you add a sprig of thyme and half a bayleaf. Simple!

With this recipe in mind, and knowing I was going to scale it down, I happily set off to chinatown to buy some pork belly on the cheap. I ended up purchasing about a pound. I already had coarse salt, saltpeter, and the herbs, so I was ready to go.

But as I reread the recipe I became a little…consternated. Now, saltpeter has always kind of skeeved me out, as does any ingredient which may be poisonous. It’s the sort of thing where if I cook with it, I always try the food myself and wait a while to see if it’s safe before serving it to other people. To this end, I was double checking the numbers here and while the ratio of salt to saltpeter seemed normal, the instruction to rub the meat down with pure saltpeter seemed a little absurd. I don’t know if the material they were working with was less pure or if this is really just meant for really big hunks of meat like a whole pork shoulder or what, but I decided to skip that part, and since the amount of saltpeter would be minuscule with my little piece of pig anyways, I just forwent the saltpeter altogether. So, really the only thing separating this saltpork from something a Union Army soldier or Royal Navy cookie would have used is the herbs.

In it went to the tupperware with a sprig of thyme and a bayleaf (a laughably small amount of aromatics btw, but according to Escoffier this is actually over-herbed by a significant margin). 

In she goes...

(I ended up completely filling the tub)

This all was about two weeks ago. Today my little belly emerged from its salt tub, no longer green meat but real, true, salt pork. It has a strong porcine smell when it cooks, and somewhat of a musky pig flavor on its own; hard to say if that’s a product of the meat or the curing (probably the former honestly, but it’s rare in America to find pork that tastes like…anything…so it’s a little surprising to me). I honestly don’t mind it, and in the context of a sauce it mellows out and becomes quite nice. A little…earthy, maybe? I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s worth nothing that literal musk is the base note for many high-end perfumes. I made a quick tomato sauce and it was delicious.

The major benefit that I can see with this ingredient as opposed to, say, bacon or guanciale or even pancetta - which is the closest of these to true salt pork - is that it has a much more neutral flavor since it’s not aromatized with smoke or a lot of spices. So instead of smokey tomato sauce, or tomato-and-bacon sauce, the end product was just a good tomato sauce, clean and clear. I also left the skin on, which may be part of the reason it smelled so strongly (I’ve heard Chinese chefs say you should singe and scrub pork skin or else your pork belly dish will have a “skin smell”) which should add some gelatin to a long-simmered sauce, in addition to keeping the pieces from totally dissolving away.

The applications for this are legion. Baked beans, soups and stews, sauces, garnishes… is anybody working on a saltpork-lard-washed cocktail? Anyways, I’m getting carried away. The pork is delicious and I’ll be using it in future blog poasts. Next time I may make a bigger quantity and use nitrates. Thyme will thell.

To health!