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Home-cured meats – off-the-scale delicious - The Guardian
Making your own bacon and salt beef gives you the chance to avoid the nitrates and nitrites of the industrially processed product – but can you keep it pink?
discovered domestic curing in an absolutely stunning book, Salt, Sugar, Smoke by Diana Henry, where there’s a recipe for salt beef without which my adult life would have been immeasurably poorer. The beauty of home-curing is twofold. For some reason, it is off-the-scale delicious. Better still, you end up with tons of meat, more than you could ever justify buying in a shop.
But cured meats are steadily becoming infamous as a lurking cancer risk on the scale of tobacco. Meat, generally, wreaks havoc upon your colon (red meat is associated with cancer risk if you eat it in large amounts), and a meta-study in 2011 found that cured meats could increase your risk of colon cancer even if you just like the occasional slice of ham. And slices of ham, like cloves of garlic, are almost never consumed in ones. There is also evidence of a breast cancer risk. The World Health Organization places bacon in the same category as asbestos, alcohol and arsenic.
It’s all about nitrates and nitrites, which have traditionally been used to keep meat pink and kill botulism: saltpetre, which you use in the salt beef, is potassium nitrate. There are other ways to avoid botulism: parma ham makers haven’t used nitrates or nitrites in 25 years. But even processed meat marked “nitrite-free” often uses vegetable extracts – celery or beetroot juice powder – that go on to produce nitrites, either in the preserving process or when they meet your bacteria. The best way to ensure you’re not eating them is to cure meat yourself. Pinkness sounds like the most trivial matter, until you consider what the alternative is to pink: grey. Nobody wants to eat grey food. But let’s worry about that in 10 days.
Making your own bacon and salt beef gives you the chance to avoid the nitrates and nitrites of the industrially processed product – but can you keep it pink?
discovered domestic curing in an absolutely stunning book, Salt, Sugar, Smoke by Diana Henry, where there’s a recipe for salt beef without which my adult life would have been immeasurably poorer. The beauty of home-curing is twofold. For some reason, it is off-the-scale delicious. Better still, you end up with tons of meat, more than you could ever justify buying in a shop.
But cured meats are steadily becoming infamous as a lurking cancer risk on the scale of tobacco. Meat, generally, wreaks havoc upon your colon (red meat is associated with cancer risk if you eat it in large amounts), and a meta-study in 2011 found that cured meats could increase your risk of colon cancer even if you just like the occasional slice of ham. And slices of ham, like cloves of garlic, are almost never consumed in ones. There is also evidence of a breast cancer risk. The World Health Organization places bacon in the same category as asbestos, alcohol and arsenic.
It’s all about nitrates and nitrites, which have traditionally been used to keep meat pink and kill botulism: saltpetre, which you use in the salt beef, is potassium nitrate. There are other ways to avoid botulism: parma ham makers haven’t used nitrates or nitrites in 25 years. But even processed meat marked “nitrite-free” often uses vegetable extracts – celery or beetroot juice powder – that go on to produce nitrites, either in the preserving process or when they meet your bacteria. The best way to ensure you’re not eating them is to cure meat yourself. Pinkness sounds like the most trivial matter, until you consider what the alternative is to pink: grey. Nobody wants to eat grey food. But let’s worry about that in 10 days.