I'm guessing but I think it's a safe bet that we all, well non veggies that is love a good bacon buttie with loads of crispy bacon in a large white bread bun [ bap for you scots and yorkshire people] with oodles of Brown sauce. It has to be red on egg sarnies but brown on bacon. The only trouble is that you get that horrible sticky white goo in the pan as you cook your big bacon buttie. The reason for the white gunk is that the chemically processed stuff we call "bacon" is indeed a lump of meat pumped full of chemicals to act as a fast cure and also to colour the meat the recognised "Pink / Red" colour.

To dry cure your own bacon all you need to do is get a joint of belly pork and rub in to the skin and meat a mixture of "Curing salts"

Now there are a lot of controversy about the use of these "salts" because it is a mixture of Salt, salt petre and nitrite.

My first attempt at making bacon was to stick a lump of belly pork in a lot of salt and leave it in the fridge turning it every day and draining off any liquor. After 10 days I washed and dried the "bacon" and eagerly fried some off. It was really nice but the saltiness was un palatable and I LOVE a lot of salt.

After this I got a recipe that mixed 50% salt with 50% brown sugar for a "sweet cure" bacon and as previous it was cured, fried and eaten. It tasted immeasurably better than the first lot but still a lot of salt taste and to be honest far, far too much salt especially if you need to reduce your salt intake for high blood pressure for example.

So I done a lot of research, asked a lot of questions of people who cure meats and the overall consensus was that you need the three "chemicals" which are Salt, salt petre and nitrite

I came across this site Graig farm and in their curing page the following information is available.

Salt alone - this produces a rather salty, poorly coloured product - not particularly pleasant to look at, and sometimes rather too salty for many people's palate. It could also enables bacteria which cause the disease Botulism to develop.

Salt plus salt petre (nitrate) - normally a good flavour and colour, but rather variable in outcome. Botulism bugs prevented from developing.

Salt, salt petre and nitrite - a more consistent product - the "normal" way of producing ham. Also prevents botulism bugs from developing.

There is a lot more information on this site but I am so happy that I found this site and although I have not bought from here I will be because this is the only site I found that offered the idea that botulism could develop.

I have done a third series of dry curing and to do this I bought a fast cure mix from my sausage making supplier and proceeded as follows.

Then rub in the curing salts at a rate of 5% to weight. That is for every kilogramme of meat [1000g] use 50g of curing salts or if you want a sweet cure use 45g of curing salts and 5g of soft brown sugar.

Here you can see the salts on the belly pork and then I wrapped the meat in a plastic bag to try and keep the liquor in the meat.

It was then put in the fridge and left for 10 days in total.

Each day I looked at it and it seemed not to have changed so after 5 days I washed the mix off and it still looked like raw belly pork but with a grey colour to the rind.

I then decided to cover the meat in the same amount of mix as first used, in essence re curing it and it was a disaster because I left it to re cure for a further 5 days hence the 10 days all together. After the 10th day I washed the mix off and dried the pork. To eager to let it stand I cut some off and fried it straight away and it was really nice. Not too salty but well coloured and really tasty.

The problems came when I left the joint of meat in the fridge and used it slowly each day. The meat became far too salty as it got to the end of the joint and I mean unable to eat it too salty. I love salt and, regardless of high blood pressure i still use salt but this was far too salty to even contemplate eating.

I have been told since that after the 5 days of curing you need to wash the joint then leave it in the fridge to, I guess continue the curing process.

I've not done anymore since but that's down to having no spare cash to buy the lump of belly pork etc.

Keep checking back to this page as I'll have another go this next week begriming 24th of October 2011 and see if there is any difference.