Natural drying observation
Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2016 02:34
This may be of little interest to those using curing chambers but to anyone not this might be as interesting to you as it is to me. As you may know I rarely use a curing chamber and have gone to curing meats with the weather since I live in an area that typically has high humidity.
I've been monitoring my ambient temps and humidity with a little instrument I found at Home Depot and it gives the max and min of the temps and the humidity so its been easy enough to monitor the curing.
Anyhow, I've been monitoring things for the last couple of weeks and found something interesting yet somewhat puzzling. Based on the readings when the temperature increases through the day so does the humidity. While I wasn't the best pupil in hydrology and that was many years ago this just seemed wrong and goes against the accepted relationship between temp and humidity.
If my understanding is correct then this little quirk of nature is really helpful in curing meats since I would think at higher temperatures the meat will dry faster and would require a higher humidity to prevent case hardening and less humidity at lower slower drying rates. I don't know if this is right but it seems logical. At any rate, I just thought it interesting and thought it worth sharing and maybe someone can add to this observation because there is so much I'd like to know.
I've been monitoring my ambient temps and humidity with a little instrument I found at Home Depot and it gives the max and min of the temps and the humidity so its been easy enough to monitor the curing.
Anyhow, I've been monitoring things for the last couple of weeks and found something interesting yet somewhat puzzling. Based on the readings when the temperature increases through the day so does the humidity. While I wasn't the best pupil in hydrology and that was many years ago this just seemed wrong and goes against the accepted relationship between temp and humidity.
Anyway, what I found in my situation is the exact opposite. When the temp was at 50F the humidity was at 60% but when the temp increased to 60F the humidity rose to 78% - or about a 2% increase for each degree of temp increase and vice versa. I thought this interesting. The only explanation I can think of is when the temperature increases so does evaporation which puts more water vapor in the air.If the water vapor content stays the same and the temperature drops, the relative humidity increases. If the water vapor content stays the same and the temperature rises, the relative humidity decreases. This is because colder air doesn't require as much moisture to become saturated as warmer air.
If my understanding is correct then this little quirk of nature is really helpful in curing meats since I would think at higher temperatures the meat will dry faster and would require a higher humidity to prevent case hardening and less humidity at lower slower drying rates. I don't know if this is right but it seems logical. At any rate, I just thought it interesting and thought it worth sharing and maybe someone can add to this observation because there is so much I'd like to know.