Harts of Stur Kitchen issue 09, spring 2019 | Page 60

Cook’s Notes
Save Your Bacon
Award-winning charcuterie company
founder James Smart give us The Real Cure for
making your own bacon and more
W
e started The Real Cure in 2014 and
are based in Hartgrove which is
just outside of Fontmell Magna near
Shaftesbury. We make a range of cured meats
from wild Dorset deer and free-range heritage
breed pigs reared for us by our friend Naomi. Our
range has won a number of Great Taste Awards
and is stocked in delis and on the menus of pubs
and restaurants in the area and further afield.
Today we tend to use fridges or freezers to
preserve food, but these are relatively recent
inventions and for thousands of years salting and
air drying were the main methods of preserving
valuable proteins.
To Neolithic man a deer killed on a hunt
represented a huge amount of vital protein but
only if he or she could stop it going off. It could
be argued that the discovery of salting and drying
meats was almost as important to early humans as
the discovery of fire, allowing them to store meat
throughout the winter and travel long distances
with non-perishable supplies.
So how old is the process? No one really knows
but a recent analysis of the 5,300-year-old Ötzi
the Iceman’s stomach showed that his last meal
consisted of cooked grain and a form of bacon
made from mountain goat.
Before he was shot from behind with an arrow,
Ötzi was travelling across the Alps between
modern-day Italy and Austria – a journey that
would have been impossible without his supply of
cured meat.
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Miracle Cure
You wouldn’t hang a piece of raw meat at 12-
15°C anywhere from five weeks to two years
and still expect to be able to eat it, so what is
the magic ingredient? The answer, of course,
is salt. The one thing that all bacteria have in
common is that they require water to function.
Salt binds with water molecules making them
unavailable to bacteria. In charcuterie, we
call this water activity – we are constantly
limiting the amount of water that bacteria
have to reproduce. We do this in two ways –
by adding salt and air drying. We also add
another step in minced products which is
fermentation.
If salt is the magic ingredient then it is
obviously important to use the right type.
At The Real Cure we use pure fine sea
salt. Table salt is not good as it contains
anti-caking agents to stop the salt sticking
together. This can cause problems with the
bind (the way the meat sticks together) in
salamis. You can use Himalayan pink salt,
kosher salt, sea salt but the most important
thing is that the ingredients state that it is just
salt.
Charcuterie products can be divided into
two categories: minced (eg salamis and
chorizos) and whole muscle eg air-dried
hams, pancetta, bresaola. When making
minced products the salting phase is very
important as during this we are extracting
a protein called myosin from the muscle.
Myosin is a sticky protein that binds muscles
together and is particularly useful when
making salami. In order to extract the myosin,
we must work the meat and allow enough
time for the salt to dissolve into the meat. At
the Real Cure we tend to salt all the meat we
are using before breaking for lunch and then
it is perfect for mincing afterwards.