A reference, not a recipe collection

Why this exists

Search for how much curing salt to use and you will find a hundred confident answers and almost no sources. Some of those answers are right. Working out which ones requires knowing the answer already, which is not a useful property in a reference.

Meanwhile the actual parameters are published and free. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service issues detailed guidelines on fermented, salt-cured and dried products, on jerky, on Trichinella, on cooking and on stabilisation. The ingoing nitrite limits are in the Code of Federal Regulations, which is statute and can be cited exactly. The European Commission runs a register of every protected cured meat in Europe, each with a filed production specification.

None of it is assembled. The FSIS guidelines are long PDFs written for plant managers, some with their key tables published as images. The regulations are written as ditto-marked charts that are hard to read and easy to misread. The EU register is a search interface. This site is the assembly.

The editorial position

We publish the parameters, with the citation, and we say plainly when something is outside them. That is the whole of it, and it produces three rules that shape every page.

Nothing is written from memory. Every figure on this site traces to a named dataset with a retrieval date, rendered on the page it appears on. A missing field is fine. A confidently wrong field is not.

Derived, not transcribed. Where a regulation states a limit in one unit and readers want it in another, the conversion is computed in the open with the working shown, not typed in from somewhere. A transcribed constant is a constant that can be wrong.

A gap is reported as a gap. FSIS does not publish a table of maximum degree-hours; it points at a trade association document. So this site does not print the numbers that circulate as if FSIS published them. The 2021 Cooking Guideline publishes its lethality tables as images with no text layer, so this site links to them rather than transcribing a safety table by eye.

What is here

407 protected products from the EU register, 192 substances from the chart of ingredients permitted in meat and poultry under 9 CFR 424.21(c), 57 US standards of identity, 23 regulation sections, 360 composition records, 38 product classes, seven hazards, fourteen methods and seven calculators.

The calculators are the part that took the most care. Each one shows its arithmetic on the page, names the regulation it is checking against, and tells you what it does not tell you. None of them is a black box, and none of them returns a single "safe" number without the source.

What this site does not do

It does not tell you a preparation is safe. Safety is a conclusion about a specific thing, and a web page cannot inspect your product. What it can do is report what the standard requires and let the number speak.

It does not publish a procedure it cannot tie to a published parameter. Where a step has no published number - cold smoking, for example, has no time and temperature standard because it is not a lethality treatment - the page says that rather than inventing a range.

It does not convert a figure that cannot be converted without an assumption. The chart in 9 CFR 424.21(c) permits 2 lb of nitrite to 100 gallons of pickle at a 10 percent pump level. Turning that into parts per million requires the density of the pickle, which the regulation does not state. The widely quoted answer of 200 ppm falls out only if you assume 100 gallons weighs 1,000 lb. That may be reasonable. It is not in the regulation, and an assumption dressed as a derivation is worse than either.

Who this is for

People curing meat at home who want to know what the number actually is, and small producers who need to find the parameter in a 100-page guideline. It is written for someone who can read a table and who would rather have the citation than the reassurance.

It is not a substitute for a HACCP plan, and nothing here constitutes regulatory advice. If you are producing under federal or state inspection, the guidelines themselves are what you need, and they are linked throughout.

How it is paid for

Amazon affiliate links. They are on the equipment page, on supplies, on the ingredient pages where a substance in the 9 CFR 424.21 chart has a retail form, and on the product pages where the cured meat itself can be bought. Each block is labelled where it appears and the full terms are on disclosures.

Two things are structural rather than a promise about the future. The hazard pages and the safety page carry no commercial link of any kind, because a product block next to a botulism control parameter reads as this site endorsing a procedure. And a commercial relationship does not change which figure this site prints: the parameters come from the sources listed on methodology and the arithmetic is shown on the page.

The site is operated commercially and may add further commercial features. Where it does, the disclosures page says what they are and the pages carrying them are labelled.