Brined and cooked

Mortadella

Mortadella is a brined and cooked product. This page collects the facts this site can source: its cure type, where its protected names are registered, and the curing and safety parameters a named authority actually publishes. It does not print an ageing time no source publishes.

At a glance

Cure type: Brined and cooked
Meat: not fixed by the class definition
Origin: Protected names registered in Italy
Protected designations: 2 registered (0 PDO, 2 PGI)
US standard of identity: none
Named by FSIS: no

Cure type and meat from the class definition; protected status from 2026-09-04 eAmbrosia, the EU geographical indications register. Full detail on the register and standards page.

How it is cured

Mortadella belongs to the brined and cooked family. The steps in that process, and the parameters published sources attach to each of them, are set out under cooking and stabilisation. This site describes the process and its parameters; it does not publish a procedure to follow.

Curing salts

In US regulation the permitted curing agents are sodium or potassium nitrite, which fixes colour and controls Clostridium botulinum, and sodium or potassium nitrate, permitted only as a source of nitrite and not allowed in bacon (9 CFR 424.21(c)). Products of this family are short-cured or cooked, so nitrite is the agent that applies and there is little role for a nitrate reservoir. The premixed salts sold as "cure #1" (nitrite only) and "cure #2" (nitrite plus nitrate) are trade names for these agents, not regulatory categories. This site does not publish dosing; the ingoing limits are on the ingredient and safety pages.

The permitted agents and their ingoing limits are on the nitrite and nitrate chart entries, and the safety role of each is on the safety page.

Ageing

No source this site cites publishes a typical ageing time or chamber temperature for this class. For a protected name the minimum ageing is fixed in the filed product specification, which the EU register does not expose through its API; it is reached through the register entry linked on each protected-name page. The time-and-temperature figures above, where present, are process-control parameters an authority does publish, not a house ageing style.

Protected designations

Each of these is a filed specification, protected across the EU. DOP and AOP are the Italian and French names for a PDO; the register records the scheme as PDO or PGI.

What this page does not tell you

This site publishes parameters and their sources. It does not tell anyone that a preparation is safe, because "safe" is a conclusion about a specific product rather than a property of a class. Curing controls real hazards with curing salts and with controlled temperature and humidity; the hazards, and the parameter that controls each one, are on the safety page. Nothing here is a recipe.

The full record for this class - the EU register entries, any US standard of identity, and the FoodData Central composition rows - is on the Mortadella register and standards page.

Protected status: eAmbrosia, the EU geographical indications register, retrieved 2026-09-04. Curing agents: 9 CFR 424.21(c), table of permitted curing agents (eCFR). Process parameters: FSIS compliance guidelines, cited above. Spine generated by scripts/build-products.mjs on 2026-09-09.