Curing meats with nitrates and nitrites

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.

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 it’s 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 let’s 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.

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 :

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.


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Curing Meats With Nitrates and Nitrites