Salting meats

So we purchased a half a cow and wow is that a lot more meat than I'm used to having - plus the half a pig that was thrown in for free!  So, I'm very short on freezer space and I was wondering if anyone had any experience with salting and hanging meats?  The cuts of meat I have are the regular ones - lots of steaks, roasts and such.  I know I'll be needing to build a smoke house because the bacon wasn't cured.  

What do you do with meats that have been salted and dried?  How do you cook them?  Are regular cuts like steak able to be salted or are whole muscles the only way to do it?  I know that hams are best done by sections of leg and you need to soak the salt out before cooking.  I know that you need a cool space around 40 to 55 degrees to hang the meats after salting.  I'm really looking forward to getting into preserving meat this way, but I need the basic answers first!  As in, salt, hang and then what?

In some of the pictures I have seen of the kitchen at Wheaton Labs, there are meats hanging from the ceiling.

I have not done this though this thread might be of interest to you or others:

https://permies.com/t/5326/Dry-Salt-Cures-Meat

Historically the salting and smoking of pork was more common as it was easier to preserve. The foxfire books have a section that gives you step by step instructions for curing meat. You will need a smokehouse or similar to hang it. This might be a bridge too far if you havent set up for all this yet.

I'm getting the information well before hand as I plan on harvesting my own meat in a few years.  I do have a smoker, an electric one, and the freezers are full, but I'd like to be able to clear out some space.  I just don't know if what I have in terms of cuts should be salted or not or if I should wait until the next time I go to the butcher's and get whole muscles.  I've been thinking hard about smoking the bacon I've got as it wasn't smoked, but I'm not sure if cut bacon can go in the smoker?  At least the hams were smoked, so I don't have to do that! lol

Again, for those of us who don't know, what do you do with the meat after smoking, curing?  I know to rinse the salt off and hang it to dry, but after?  Do I just chop it up and cook it?  Soak it in water to bring out the salt and then cook it?  Just cut it up and eat?

Traditionally they would have hung the smoked cured meat in the smokehouse til they needed it, and then cut pieces off depending. Salt meat would be rinsed or soaked first then cooked. Have you thought about canning some? That could help you in the here and now with freezer space.

Thank you so much!  Yes, I have thought about canning some of the meat, but it's not an option at the moment.  I'll probably do some of that this winter.  

To preface, I have not salted meats. Yet.

A resource that helps explain some of the underlying 'how salting meat works' is linked below.

https://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/nchfp/lit_rev/cure_smoke_cure.html

Make sure to change pages at the bottom with the "Previous" and "Next" arrows. I missed them the first time and was stuck on page #2.

So where do you get salt at a reasonable price. I'm guessing you want unionized salt. Seems like that would take a lot of salt. I like the idea but not sure of the process or cost effectiveness

My suggestion - short term, do what ever you can to beg/borrow more freezer space. That much meat is too valuable to risk with curing if you are not already set up for it.

Once all your meat is safe, THEN think about long term plans for other preserving methods. Do you have a way to safely hang meat in a cool place, once cured? You need low moisture, cool temperatures. Otherways to make shelf-stable meat include traditional jerky making. Amazing for snacks, less ideal if you want meals from it.

Personally, I would view curing as a way of adding value to meat, rather than primarily for long term storage. Smoked cured bacon done at home will so much better than anything you get from the shops. Likewise with salmon. But I would be doing it mostly for the massive upgrade to the flavour - shelf life of eg smoked salmon does increase, but you still need to refrigerate it at the least after it is smoked.

Saralee Couchoud wrote:So where do you get salt at a reasonable price. I'm guessing you want unionized salt. Seems like that would take a lot of salt. I like the idea but not sure of the process or cost effectiveness

I bought salt at Sam's Club in 25 lb. bags.

Amazon and Walmart both have 25 lb bags of Himalayan Pink Salt and Sea Salt that I found.

I like Michael's suggestion about borrowing freezer space.

If there are any meat processing places locally usually they have lockers to rent or will store meat for folks.

Use: 8# salt ( non iodized)
        2# sugar
        Mix together
        Hand rub this mixture on pork (up to 100#)
        Ideal curing temp. Is 36-38 degrees
        Meat should remain in the cure at least 2 days
        Per pound for hams, 1 1/2 days per pound for
        Slab bacon

Hi Kenley,

Welcome to Permies.

Thanks for the cure recipe!

Well, Anette meat that is salted and crocked will last a very long time. How do we know. Here, let me tell you about a horrible war story that happened in Aigues Mortes, France in 1421. You have a French first name, so you might be able to read it in French. It is truly horrible and disgusting, so I'll warn everyone. I'll give those who don't read French the short version.
During the 100 year war [116, but who is counting] against England, the Bourguignons, in these times were allied with England and the Governor of this coastal town [on the Mediterranean sea, and important fact] had surrendered the town to them. The inhabitants of Aigues Mortes [which means dead waters because the coastal town was now a distance away from the sea] had to accept these unwelcome 'guests'. They revolted and massacred the entire garrison. Aigues Mortes is in the south of France, and in the summer, temperatures can go pretty high, pretty fast. Long story short, there was not much time before these bodies might deteriorate and cause pestilence in the city. What to do?
Well, there was a big tower that could be used as a crock as part of the ramparts [still standing, I visited it with my students]. With the salty Mediterranean sea just steps away. Their best idea was: "Salt the Bourguignons!" The bodies were piled up in this huge tower until there would be time to bury them. The story gives this detail: They were kept salted like you would salt pork flesh in a crock.
The photo gives you an idea of the size of the famous tower. It is even more impressive on the inside as it is completely hollow.
https://www.tchinggiz.org/anecdote-aigues-mortes.html

Here is an interesting video of a reconstruction of 18th Century preservation of meat. This one is done in a tight barrel. IMHO, a crock is a better instrument as it is probably less porous.
How much salt? Well, he says you can never put too much. As long as you will be soaking it in several changes of water before you use it, I suppose you can be generous with the salt. The following video gives you a pretty good idea. It resembles how you make sauerkraut in a crock, starting with a layer of salt and making alternative layers: salt/pork/salt/pork. Make sure that just like for sauerkraut, you put weights on the final layer so as to keep air from touching the meat [or the cabbage].
https://www.google.com/search?q=recipe+for+salting+pork&oq=recipe+for+salting+pork&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i22i30j0i390i650.13807j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#kpvalbx=_co8RZczaHaPJptQPu7-ziAU_67
Once it is de-salted, you can use the pork in any recipe. The flesh will be pink, just like ham, since ham, after all IS salt pork.
He explains also that after salting it is a good idea to keep the barrel or the crock cold. That's why they would butcher in the Fall of the year, when they could count on the weather to keep things cold. A barrel might have an advantage over a crock: A crock that freezes may burst. Wood is more resilient. Heavy salting also prevents the meat/brine from freezing.
I was wondering if a food grade 55 gallon barrel might solve your storage problem. [It doesn't need to be completely full provided you keep the salted pork under the brine, out of the air]. The cold help but is not absolutely necessary: Sailors ate salt pork on their vessels in wood barrels and sailed in the tropics, so air is the enemy here. As long as you keep the meat away from the air with enough brine, you should be fine. If the weather is warm, you may have to be checking on it often as the watery brine will evaporate.

missing some points.  Ideally cured meat include the proper nitrites and nitrates.  Primarily you are looking at Prague #1 and Prague #2 curing salts.  #1 is for meats that will be cooked and #2 is curing meats that will not be cooked and things like sausage that are ground/blended or chopped up in the making.  Salts for curing in the past came from source that included nitrites and nitrates.  Modern Prague salts have food coloring added to make them pink.  At least some of the natural salts that are pink included those nitrites/nitrates completely naturally which is why that is the identifier used in modern salts.

Using the meat.  Rather than being a full meal the salt cured meats were an addendum/condiment to the meal so their salt became the salt for the whole meal.  An alternate at least for ham was my mother changed the cooking water on the home cured hams about half way thru cooking them to pull salt.  It was also done as a low slow cook giving maximum time for the salt to move out to the water.  You can also use the normal tricks like cooking potatoes in the water too, to absorb some of the salt.(in some cases eating the potatoes and in some cases just throwing them away)

I am going to suggest you want the needed freezer space as this is a skill that should be learned slowly if you don't want to waste a bunch of meat thru mistakes.

While we now have an astonishing array of salts to cure meats, 15th Century people [and before them Middle Ages people] didn't have those and they were successful in curing their meats with just plain sea salt which probably contains most of the ingredients of curing salt. I have no doubt that knowing the differences between the kinds of salt may give a more 'professional' product, but for me, sea salt will give me the results I want at a lesser cost. [Have you seen the price of Himalayan pink salt these days? Wow!]
Because sea salt will also remove water from meat cells, it is a great alternative:
https://koyuncusalt.com/en/salt-library/curing-salt-substitutes-4-alternatives#:~:text=Nitrates%20are%20not%20the%20only,experts%20recommend%20avoiding%20iodized%20salt.
Someone mentioned that when the meat is too salty, some folks cook potatoes with it. Yep, that's what my mom did. She used to buy huge slabs of salted cod, try to remove most of the salt by soaking it, and then still cook potatoes with it. That really worked well and made absolutely delicious cod chowder.
Before  the salt pulling potato came to Europe, the go-to vegetable in the winter was the cabbage. There were no potatoes to be had and potatoes were kept as long as possible in the ground. When the cabbage was mature, people would give the cabbage a quarter of a turn right in the field to remove most of the side roots. That usually prevented the cabbage from splitting if the fall was very rainy, or they would cover it.  When the weather became too cold, it was brought in the dirt basement to survive fresh for a good many meals or made into sauerkraut. Fresh cabbage is great at pulling the excess salt from salt pork or salt beef.

Yes, you only need the fancy curing salts if you are doing non whole muscle (using ground meats). My understanding is this is as the dangerous bacteria need an air free environment to work with. I never really understood that, as there are definitely places in whole muscle meats that end up being pretty far from the air, but even the most careful people say this.

As for the the eating. It pretty much just does not make sense to cure for longevity any longer. A chest freezer is VERY energy efficient, the salt will cost more.
I just make lunch meat style parma hams and beef "parma hams". I only cook with it as a flavor additive, and mostly eat it as sandwiches, or on crackers or nachos.

This is the main resource I used: https://publications.ca.uky.edu/files/ASC213.pdf
Like previously mentioned the standard recipe is
8 salt to 2 sugar for 100 meat, and a minimum of 18% water weight loss. (I have always assumed you ignore the salt weight, so that actually translates into a 28ish% weight loss)
This 8+2 is pretty much the maximum a ham will absorb with a surface rub. You cannot get much more.

But they say that you only technically need a 4% salt concentration. But it is worth noting that the hams will get pretty moldy if you have much less salt, which might turn off some people. I am just very worried I will screw something up and ruin a lot of time and meat so always go with the full treatment.

I personally do the entire process in a fridge.