umai salt percent is wrong !!! need help asap

king kabanos
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umai salt percent is wrong !!! need help asap

Post by king kabanos » Thu Oct 01, 2015 22:03

just ordered some bags from umai and looking at there recipe for capicola it says 60 grams of the meats weight which is 3 percent. But they say to add 6 tablespoons of salt on 4.5 pounds of meat and that 110 grams of salt not 60. 1 table spoon of salt is 18-20 grams so i think there wrong right? and for there panchetta recipe they say to add 3/4 cup of salt for 10 pounds of pork belly way off. any way i have 5 pounds of pork belly that i want to turn into panchetta so i would add 3 tablespoons of salt and not 6 right? plus 1 teasppon cure #2 and spices.
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Post by Bob K » Thu Oct 01, 2015 22:42

2.8 - 3.0 % salt would be fine for either one. Weight is the only accurate way to measure salt.
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Post by king kabanos » Thu Oct 01, 2015 23:16

So how many tablespoons of salt do I add 3 or 6? Has anyone followed there recipe and it came out to salty
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Post by edukimi » Fri Oct 02, 2015 01:40

Last spring, I used the UMAi video for the capicola. The video recipe called for 3 TB salt. What I did not understand at that time is that salts weigh differently and 3 TB of the salt used, at the time that video was created, might weigh in at 3%, it was not the case for the salt I was using. Afterwards, I discovered that the salt I put in my cure was about half the correct amount. I also only cured for 1 week per the video, and had inadvertently used a 4 1/2 pound boneless pork butt instead of a coppa.

Anyhow, I contacted UMAi as I was (and kinda still am) new to all this. I wanted to know if my capicola would make people sick. They assured me that I just needed to stick it out and give it the time to dry. The low salt and cure time would inhibit the drying. After 13.5 weeks, I gave in with a 31% reduction. It was delicious. :)

Anyhow, the moral I learned from that experience is WEIGH don't measure your salt. I use 2.5% but I hear most aim for the 3%.

Sorry, now to address your last question. 4.5 lb = 72 oz = 2016 grams. 3% of 2016 g = 60g (i would be doing 2.5% and therefore 50.4 grams) Now, to convert to volume for your salt. If your salt is like a Mortons it is probably 1.5 g for 1/4 teaspoon. Do the math and you get that 60 grams would be 10 tsp. If your salt is the one I use, Diamond Crystal non-iodized kosher salt, it runs .7g for a 1/4 tsp. Again, doing the math, 60 grams should come out at 21.43 tsp. For my 2.5% and salt of choice, I would be adding 18 teaspoons of salt for the 4.5 lb meat. Please double check my math, but I hope you get the idea.

If you don't have a scale, buy one for the next time. I recently purchased a jewelers scale so I can measure out all my spices to the .1. It makes life much easier.
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Post by king kabanos » Fri Oct 02, 2015 02:36

i do have a scale and 3 percent of 5 pounds equals 68 grams so that means i will have to use 68 grams of salt for 5 pounds of meat right? well i use mortons pickling salt whch is non iodized its the same weight as table salt. anyway i weighed the 1 tablespoon of sale and came out to 18 grams. so the total would be 3.5 table spoons of salt about that and not 6 table sppons as on umai website thats what i want to know if i put 3.5 or 6. here is the link also you can look up a salt calculator.


http://www.drybagsteak.com/recipe-charc ... picola.php
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Post by edukimi » Fri Oct 02, 2015 02:52

Yes, you would want 68 grams of salt for you 5 lb of meat. For the salt you are using at 18 per tablespoon, you would want 3.78 tablespoon. This is where just weighing out the 68 grams on the scale is easier than measuring 3.78 tablespoons.

As for the quantity of salt from the link you provided. The volume of salt they are using 6 TB for 4.5 lb of meat which means they are using a salt that weighs .7 g per 1/4 teaspoon. That matches my recollection that their most recent salt of choice is the diamond crystal that I use, so those numbers make sense. (Note that also matches my calculation in my previous post)
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Post by king kabanos » Fri Oct 02, 2015 03:04

ohhhh sorry look at this link i did not know that diamond crystal weighed less is it coarse or not?

so i guess i will just use 3.5 tablespoons of pickling salt for 5 pounds right?


http://dadcooksdinner.com/2012/02/salt-by-weight.html/
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Post by edukimi » Fri Oct 02, 2015 03:16

Prior to learning from my mistakes curing meats, I never understood why the saltiness of my food differed depending on the salt I used. I always thought salt is salt.

Anyhow, this is a great education and I am thrilled to understand this and I now use that knowledge in my regular cooking.

I have my generic "morton's" in front of me as well as the diamond crystal kosher salt. The "morton's" has a distinct crystalline structure. The diamond crystal is described as flaked on the packaging and I can see this by eye as well. It has the same, or maybe less, coarseness as the morton's. The packaging claim the flakes adhere to food better.
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Post by king kabanos » Fri Oct 02, 2015 04:13

i have a quick question about panchetta i have both cures 1 and 2 . and i want one panchetta for stews frying and i think lardons to use cure #1 but if you want to eat it with sandwhiches then use #2. do i still dry cure the panchetta both ways until 35-40 percent weight loss?
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Post by redzed » Fri Oct 02, 2015 06:09

Just out of curiosity I weighed 6 tablespoons of the sea salt I currently use in my dry curing projects and it weighed 93g. So if I measured by volume rather than weight, I would have added more than 50% more salt than necessary. My coppa would certainly be overly salty. Using the equilibrium method, I now use 2.5% salt (25g/kg). When you add the .3% (3g/kg) cure, you have a total of 2.8% which is enough salt as far as taste and safety aspects. So Dan, you are correct in pointing out that the Umai recipe is confuses the issue and depending on the salt you use, can be incorrect. As Bob pointed out, and as our new member edukumi so eloquently explained, totally ignore the volume amounts in any recipes you run across, when it comes to salt and cure. Add these by weight only!

As to your question about pancetta, use #2 if you are going to dry it for 4 weeks of longer. Less than that, use #1. (As in Marianski's instructions). Hanging a pancetta for 2-3 months or even longer is not uncommon. And the Italians use the same pancetta for cooking and flavoring or eating as is. The USDA rules which do not allow nitrates in bacon do not apply to pancetta since it is a dry cured product and the nitrates are converted to nitrites over time. I don't know what recipes you are using, but unless your pork belly is extra lean, you will have difficulty in getting a 35%-40% weight loss. Since a pork belly can easily be 50% or more fat, it contains very little water.

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Post by edukimi » Fri Oct 02, 2015 14:32

Also, the ease of weighing does not just apply to salt in a recipe. I have switched over to using weights for all the ingredients as it makes scaling a recipe so much easier and I can measure out those odd amounts that if I was using a measuring spoon I would be estimating, or rounding up or down. My notebook began all in teaspoons/tablespoons. It is now all in grams.

I think the difficulties people have with the salt in these recipes is that many of us (yes, that was me) do not realize that salts contain differing amounts of sodium. The sodium of course creates the saltiness of a given salt. That sodium directly correlates to the weight of a given volume. Morton's will taste twice as salty as Diamond Crystal.

All and all, it is easy for us to mess up using a recipe that calls for salt in volume as you have no idea how the salt the designer of the recipe used compares to the salt that you intend to use. The error could go either way, too high or too low or even just perfect. But, it is unpredictable.

There is one blogger out there whose recipe's ingredients are posted totally as percentages of the meat weight in grams.

Redzen, nice scale. :)
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Post by king kabanos » Fri Oct 02, 2015 15:31

thank you both i heard that if you plan to cook the panchetta then do not use cure#2 is that right or no? also i got my recipe from umai where it says 35-40 percent. so how long should i dry my panchetta ? this is my first time getting into dry curing charcuterie so i am a total newbie. i know so much about making sausage, smoked hams , and other things but this is new to me you never stop learing. here is the link for the recipe


http://www.drybagsteak.com/recipe-homem ... uterie.php
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Post by edukimi » Fri Oct 02, 2015 15:36

i don't have and answer for you on this. I will be monitoring and learning from the answer as well.

PS I thought the cure choice had to do with the total time the item is curing and drying.
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Post by redzed » Fri Oct 02, 2015 15:50

Hi Dan, I thought I answered that question already. If you are going to use the recipe you posted, use #2, because the nitrate will slowly keep working over the 4-8 week period. It does not matter how you are going to eat it. #1 will probably work well too but for fear of botulism I would never cure anything the Umai way with salt only. And again, the percentage of weight loss will depend on the amount of fat in it. You will never have the same results every time. Just follow the recipe, make notes, and see what happens. If after 8 weeks you you have a weight loss of 35-40%, that's fine, or only 20-25%, your pancetta will also be good.

Keep us posted! :grin:
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Post by NorthFork » Fri Oct 02, 2015 16:42

king kabonos, I have a batch of Pancetta Arrotolata curing in the Umai bags right now. I cut the belly into 4 pieces to allow it to fit the Umai bags that I have, I used a different recipe than that on the Umai site (one that redzed suggested-recipe here https://ourdailybrine.com/how-to-make-r ... ta-recipe/ ). I cured 2 with Cure #2 and 2 with Cure #1. I cured the first stage for 19 days and then put them in the Umai bags and into the fridge at 36°F. At 20 days into the drying phase one of the cure #1 pancetta lost it's vacuum and I decided to pull it and do a taste test (no patience), at that point it had lost just under 15% of the green weight(weight including the Umai bag at the beginning of the drying phase). Below is a picture of a slice taken at the time I pulled it. The other 3 pieces are still drying and moving along pretty well. I weighed them yesterday(32 days drying time) and they are at: the remaining cure #1 has a loss of 21.45%(original weight 830g) the cure #2 pieces are at 20% loss (original weight 886g) and 14.33% loss(original weight 977g). The piece that is at 14% is somewhat fatter than the others and somewhat larger which I assume accounts for the slower weight loss. I plan on opening the other cure #1 piece in another week or so but will leave the cure #2 pieces for some time.
I know this has nothing to do with the salt issue(that's pretty well covered) but may give you an idea what to expect with the Umai bags--
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Good luck
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