Curing meats with nitrates and nitrites














 








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Curing Meats With Nitrates
and Nitrites
 
We had been and
are still using nitrates because :

1. We like our meats to be red
not only when they are fresh but after cooking or smoking, too.

Nitrates can preserve the color of the meat. The same piece of ham when roasted
will have light brown color and is known as roasted leg of pork. Add some
nitrates to it , apply smoke or boil it and it becomes ham with its
characteristic flavor and pink color.

 2.
Nitrates impart to a meat a characteristic cured flavor

 3.
Nitrates prevent transformation of botulinum spores into toxins thus eliminating
the possibility of food poisoning

Nitrates have been used to cure meat since we can remember and how they were
originally discovered is a matter of speculation.  Someone probably used salt to
preserve meat that had more potassium nitrate in it and discovered that meat had
a different taste and color or someone spilled some gun powder on preserved meat
and discovered the same. Yes, potassium nitrate was the main ingredient for
making gun powder and itłs commercial name was saltpeter, used until today.
Potassium nitrate (KNO3
Bengal saltpetre) or sodium nitrate (NaNO3
Chile
saltpetre) were even added to water causing temperature to drop and that method
was used to cool wine in the XVI century. Even some
natural waters are known to contain enough nitrate to induce pink color to meat.

Nitrates and nitrites are also quite powerful poisons and that is why the Food
and Drug Administration established limits for their use. So why
do we use them ? The simple answer is that until today, after some tests and
experiments, our modern science has not come up with a better ingredient to cure
meats and prevent food poisoning known as botulism. And
now letłs make something clear as almost all books written about sausages repeat
one after another the same story : nitrates are used to prevent food poisoning
known as botulism. Partly so

Nitrates were successfully added to meat for thousands of years and only in the XIX
century a German fellow Justinus Kemer linked food poisoninig to contaminated
sausages. It took another 80 years to discover botulinum bacteria by Emile
Pierre van Ermengem, Professor of bacteriology at the University of Ghent  in
1895. The first scientific papers that explained behaviour of nitrates were
published only in XX century so why had we been using nitrates so much ? Not to
cure botulism of which we had never even heard about before.
Whatłs better, Nitrate or Nitrite?
Nitrates are
seldom used today as they are not easy to
control when applying to meats and they don't work at refrigerator temperatures.
Increasing temperature helps development of bacteria and shortens the useful
life of a meat product. Those two factors basically eliminate nitrate from
practical use and instead sodium nitrite is commonly used in the
USA (Cure # 1) and everywhere else (Peklosol in Poland and in Germany). And
the reason it took us so long to figure it out is that although nitrate was used
to cure meats for thousands of years, its derivative "nitrite" was only
discovered in the last century. To add
to the confusion our commonly available cures contain both nitrite and nitrate.
All commercial meat plants prepare their own cures where both nitrite and
nitrate are used. All original European sausage recipes include nitrate and now
have to be converted to nitrite. So what is the big difference?
Almost no difference at
all. Whether we use nitrate or nitrite, the final result is basically the same.
The difference between nitrate is as big as the difference between wheat flour 
and the bread that was baked from it. The nitrate is the Mama that gives a birth
to the Baby (nitrite). It is still the same family and both nitrates and
nitrites are commonly used as can be seen in the folowing table:




Name

Nitrate

Nitrite



Cure #1

No

Yes



Cure #2

Yes

Yes



Morton® Tender Quick®

Yes

Yes



Morton® Sugar Cure®

Yes

Yes



Morton® Smoke Flavored Sugar Cure®

Yes

No



Nitrite is an even more
powerful poison than nitrate as you need only about 1/3 of a tea-spoon to say
good-bye, where in a case of nitrate you may need 1 tea-spoon or more. So all
this explanation that nitrite is safer for you makes absolutely no sense at all.  The main reason is that adding nitrite to meat does not leave much room for a
question like: Do I have enough of nitrate or no? In other words, it is more
predictable and it is easier to control the dosage. Estimating the required
amount of nitrate is harder as it is dependent on :

Temperature (higher temperature more nitrite is
released from nitrate)
Amount of bacteria present in meat  that is needed for
nitrate to produce nitrite and here we do not have any control.The more
bacteria present, the more nitrite released. Adding sugar may be beneficial
as it provides food for bacteria to grow faster.

Another good reason for using nitrite is
that it is effective at low temperatures (36°
40° F) where nitrate likes
temperatures a bit higher (46°-50° F, 8°-10° C). By curing meats at lower
temperatures (nitrite) we prevent the development of bacteria what will extend
the shelf life of a product and in the case of a commercial plant, it will bring
more profits.
When nitrates were used alone, salt
penetration was usually ahead of color development. As a result most larger
pieces like hams were too salty when colored properly and had to be soaked in
water. This problem has been eliminated when using nitrite. Nitrite works much
faster and the color is fixed well before salt can fully penetrate the meat.
In the 1920s, the government allowed to
add 10 lbs of nitrate to 100 gallons of water (7 lbs allowed today). A finished
cured product could contain no more than 200 parts of nitrite per million parts
of the product (the same today). The problem was that only about one quarter of
the meat plants adhered to those limits and many plants added much more, even
between 70 and 90 pounds. We may say that it was a guessing game and the more
the better. As a result a customer was eating a lot of nitrates.
To be fair it must be mentioned  that it takes
about 5 times more (by weight) of nitrate to cure the same amount of meat that
if only nitrite were used. I have to mention also the fact that all my
friends and family (myself included) have always eaten a lot of meats cured with
nitrates and we all seem to keep on living without any health problems. And most
of them reach the age of 80 or more.
 

More information on curing can be found at:

Curing

 
 

Page edited on September 14, 2006

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