How to Dry Cure Meat at Home Guide

Curing meat at home can be done in 2 main ways. After learning these techniques for a few decades, I will share the most helpful and comprehensive method. This isn’t the same as following a cooking recipe since you use preservation techniques.

It is more than just following a recipe; it’s a process you want to describe in great detail. It’s craft and science. It would be unwise to give a short recipe-style introduction to dry-cured meats.

Please be aware that dry curing meat is a process. This article is comprehensive and detailed because of this. I’ve also included videos and links to many articles I’ve written that relate to this.

I wanted to create a valuable resource for someone new to the glorious world of meat curing and give a decent overview of all the ways you can approach curing meat at home.

Most of this website is dedicated to the techniques below.

The main topic is dry-cured meats, which I have extensively learned and taught others how to perform in a cellar, regular kitchen fridge, professional drying chamber, or DIY curing chamber.

Process of Dry Curing at Home

1. Select Your Method: Choose between the saturation method or equilibrium curing, depending on your preference and experience level.
2. Calculate Salt Content: Determine the appropriate amount of salt and curing salt (if desired) based on the weight of the meat. Accurate digital scales are essential for precision.
3. Prepare the Cure: Mix salt, spices, and curing agents thoroughly, ensuring even distribution.
4. Apply the Cure: Coat the meat generously with the curing mixture, ensuring all surfaces are covered.
5. Cure in a Suitable Environment: Place the meat in a cool, well-ventilated area with controlled humidity, such as a refrigerator or DIY curing chamber.
6. Monitor Progress: Regularly check the meat’s weight and appearance to gauge the curing process’s progression.
7. Rinse and Prepare for Hanging: Once fully cured, rinse the meat thoroughly to remove excess salt and spices. Optionally, apply additional spices or aromatics before hanging.
8. Hang and Dry: Hang the meat in a suitable environment, ensuring proper airflow and humidity levels for optimal drying.

Important Considerations

• Humidity and Temperature: For ideal drying conditions, maintain a slightly humid (65-75%) and cool (50-60°F/10-15°C) environment.
• Equipment and Ingredients: Quality meat, accurate scales, curing salts, and spices are essential for successful curing.
• Storage and Shelf Life: Properly cured and stored meats can last for weeks to months, with fat content influencing longevity.

Cured meat falls into three categories: cold smoking, hot smoking, wet/brine curing, and dry salt curing.

Specifically, I am talking about dry-curing meat known in Italy as Salumi & in modern terms, sometimes referred to as charcuterie (charcuterie is a French term for rillettes, pates, salami, whole, muscle dry-cured meats, and porky bits – many other French smallgoods strictly speaking).

(Salt) Dry Curing is a method of bringing out and preserving the incredible flavor.

Reduce moisture in the meat to a point where the meat flavor is amplified and preserved since unwanted bacteria that spoil meat don’t have moisture to thrive on.

Dry Curing is like those classics such as – Parma Prosciutto, Braesola, or Pancetta.

Sometimes, cold smoking is involved in dry-curing meat. In essence, cold smoking is ‘drying’ the meat to a point where it is preserved, just like dry curing. Smoke has beneficial functions, such as being antibacterial/fungal.

35% weight loss is the dry curing weight loss goal when you know it has been stabilized and has reached a finished state of preservation.

(sometimes it’s dried more than this, like types of biltong or salt fish)

Also, it’s good to note that most meats are around 70% water, 20% protein, and other stuff.

Animal fat, like pork fat, is lower in water content than the main muscle meat.

Making cured meats at home reduces weight loss. An example is salt-cured Lardo, which is pure fat, dry salt-cured.

This guide is focused on dry-cured meat.

This guide will also provide some specifics on how to cure meat in a regular fridge.

Curing Meat at Home

Dry curing meat follows one of two methods: saturation/salt box or equilibrium curing.

There is a traditional way (saturation/salt box) that isn’t about consistency and a precise method (equilibrium curing).

The most consistent technique (equilibrium curing link to detailed article) often leads to often more consistent outcomes than the saturation or saltbox method, which will also be covered.

Process of Dry Curing at Home

Dry Curing Meat at Home

1. Use the salt box method or equilibrium curing method
2. Accurately calculate the required pink-curing salt (optional)
3. Mix salt, spices & cure, and apply to meat
4. Cure in a fridge or cool area
5. Once fully cured, remove from fridge & rinse thoroughly
6. Weigh and calculate 65% weight, of the finished weight minimum
7. Optional Casing
8. Hang the meat in a suitable environment

Important Aspects

Drying cured meat (link to charcuterie/dry cured meats category list on this site) can be done in many different areas and scenarios.

You want a slightly humid (65-75%) environment and foolish (50-60°F/10-15°C) – with air exchange or airflow not essential, it does help. (technically one m/s)

So the meat dries out inside, and if the humidity is too high, the outside goes hard.

(case hardening it’s called often)

For short-term dry curing like regular fridge curing (done in 4 weeks or less), this doesn’t matter as much).

A dry curing chamber is not essential, and I have written about what you need to build your own with an old fridge or wine fridge. If you want to read more about this, you can also get the guide in my charcuterie course.

Or you can try some dry-curing in your existing regular fridge. It’s probably the best thing to start with, and if you become interested, you can explore the dedicated curing chamber.

If you have a protected area that has a temperature of around 11-15°C/50-60°F most of the time, this can also be used for some short-term projects. It just depends on the humidity.

You can buy a hygrometer gauge (measure moisture/water in the air) to determine your home level.

Steps for Curing Meat At Home

1. Using the Salt Box Method or Equilibrium Cure

If you don’t have the accurate digital scales mentioned above, you’ll want to use the ” Saltbox ” method. You can get away with level teaspoons if you trust their 2.5-gram approximation because it will depend on the salt!

My preference is always to use equilibrium curing if I can.

Especially if you are starting projects in your regular kitchen fridge, you get more precision and better outcomes. The salt box method can always be a bit hit-and-miss due to the variations in the meat cuts and how much you roll around the meat in the salt.

Salt Box Method – Curing

So, all you do is have a pan or tray with salt, curing salt (here is a article about which salt for curing meat I wrote), and spices.

Then, you coat the meat and roll it around in the mixture. Then, you place it in a Ziploc bag in a ‘box’ to be cured in the fridge or at a fridge-like temperature.

The salt box method involves covering the whole meat with salt and leaving it for a certain number of days, based on its weight.

Sometimes, pressure is applied to help squeeze in the cure (technically, diffusion and water-binding = curing).

I also apply pressure with regular fridge equilibrium curing to speed up the curing.

Equilibrium Curing Method

The way it works is by adding a percentage of salt to the total weight of the meat.

For example, 20 grams of salt per 1,000 grams of fresh meat – 2%

Depending on salt taste preferences, most recipes will tend to be between 2% to 3%.

Based on my preferred saltiness, my preference for whole muscle meat curing is often 2-2.5%.

This percentage of salt includes (pink)curing salt.

Regular Fridge Project – LINK to Article

For regular fridge curing projects with an unmodified regular fridge, you want to use under 200 g of weight. Also, you don’t want too much fat on the piece of meat because that takes much longer to dry out.

I experienced this when I tried to have a nice pork loin with a decent fat streak, and I tried to cure it in my regular kitchen fridge with some other cured recipes I was doing, including a Hungarian smoked paprika pork loin, Spanish Chorizo style, and Beef, Juniper. Garlic & Thyme as I had done before.

I had to start up the big DIY dry curing chamber, and to my surprise, it took an extra three weeks. The other beef and pork cuts were ready in 6-10 days in the regular kitchen fridge.

2. Accurately Calculate the Required Pink Curing Salt

This is a step because when using sodium nitrates and nitrites, you should be careful with the amounts.

The option is if you want to use this product, it has different names in Europe with different ratios.

The American version is approximately 90% salt; this needs to be calculated as part of the total salt.

For example, the target salt totals 2.5%, so 2.25% is sea salt, and 0.25% is pink curing salt.

Pink Curing Salt Number 1 is for under 30 days of meat curing projects from start to finish.

Pink Curing Salt number 2 is for over 30 days of meat curing projects from start to finish.

For more on pink-curing salt I wrote an article about it here

For a calculator I created on this site for equilibrium curing, please see here (it is also linked at the top of every page)

3. Mix Cure and Apply to Meat

It’s really important to ensure all the cure is put onto the meat when it comes to equilibrium curing. I do this in a little mixing bowl or a Ziploc bag.

When using the salt box method, you must ensure the pink curing salt is evenly mixed into the salt box before using it.

Vacuum Packed Bags for Curing

I don’t think this is necessary for regular fridge equilibrium curing. However, it does allow you to leave the meat in the cure for a week or two extra with no adverse effects.

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Some guys I found on social media like using a vacuum pack for curing. If you leave it in the fridge for longer periods, this can mean it doesn’t matter if you forget about it for a week or two longer.

4. Put in Bag & Cure the Meat

A simple step: I like to put some weight on my regular fridge projects to help shape and get the salt to penetrate through the meat.

Zip Lock Bags

When you use a Ziploc bag, I find the best technique is to squeeze all the air out and leave one part of the Ziploc open so that pretty much all that air gets squeezed out before zipping shut.

How Long to Cure For?

Saltbox Method – Duration in Cure

It varies depending on the resource. The approximate ratio is 1/2 pd to 1 pd per day. Larger cuts that are 5″ or thicker will be toward the one pd per day.

Regular Fridge Project – LINK to Article

If you were using the salt box method for regular fridge curing, you could leave the meat in a salt cure for 24 hours, but in my experience, you may find the final product too salty. Duck prosciutto is used for 24-hour salt-curing, for instance.

For equilibrium curing, I have found that less than 200 g of weight will work best in a regular fridge. It should only take about 4 to 6 days, and the meat will be fully cured.

5. Remove from Bag and Rinse Meat

Once the curing process is complete, whether it’s a saltbox method for equilibrium curing, then you rinse off the cure and can rinse off most of the spices too.

If you want to get a bit fancy, some recipes from Ruhlman’s Salumi suggest rinsing off with wine. I have yet to try this; I prefer my wine to be consumed orally.

Adding Aromatic Spices before Dry Curing

Now would be the time to add another layer of flavor on the outside; you can do this by making a spice blend.

Black pepper crushed at this point also can help the antibacterial side of it because it has antibacterial properties.

6. Weigh and Calculate 65% Target Weight

Regular Fridge Project – LINK to Article

Once you get the current weight, multiply it by 0.65 to get the target weight. You won’t want to eat it until this target weight has been hit and it’s dry enough to eat (preserved per se and dried enough for wafer thin-slicing!

So, 65% = 130 grams for a 200-gram piece – once this is reached, it’s ready!

Now, I use a little cut piece of cardboard, but you can use a label printer or anything that you put a hole through. Then, record what it is and the finished weight (the date is optional). If you are wrapping it, you tie this on over the muslin just for reference.

7. Optional Casing

Regular Fridge Project – LINK to Article

So I put this in as an optional step because it does depend on the project. Most of the time, I do a regular fridge dry-cure project; I use muslin.

I have found that the pork and beef come out much better if I wrap the meat. It seems to help hold in the moisture and prevent it from drying out as much.

I like to use butcher’s twine to squeeze the cured meat, which can help the drying process a bit more. If you tie it uniformly, it is also quite aesthetically pleasing.

There are also many types of casings and bungs, which are intestines or stomachs of animals that work as well.

8. Hang Meat in a Suitable Environment

Regular Fridge Project – LINK to Article

In your regular fridge, you can’t adjust the humidity at all. But the temperature is cool enough to prevent bad bacteria, so you can create short-term dry-cured meat.

Here is a technique for a hanging system at the back of the fridge.

It’s a piece of wood measured to fit into the shelf holders and some hooks. I can then hang the meat at the back of the fridge so that it doesn’t touch anything.

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Of course, there are many ways of creating this hanging system

An expandable shower/closest rack is a unique technique I invented also:

Where to Hang Dry Cured Meats at Home

Cellar, Shed, Wine Cellar

If you have a cold enough winter and around 11-15°C /50-60°F, then you can use this environment to try dry-curing some meat. I recommend you check out the humidity to know roughly what it does.

Don’t expect every project to go perfectly in an open area or cellar; many more factors can be at play if you hang in an exposed area.

Bought or DIY curing chamber

In this environment, you’ll generally work around 70% humidity and 11°C/50°F. This is usually the accepted whole-muscle Salumi or dry-cured setting temperature, but it can be varied depending on the project.

DIY Built Dry Curing Chamber

Most of the time, once dry-cured meat projects have been done, the curing chamber starts growing a culture of good penicillin white powdery bacteria.

Here is a full article after I’ve built at least 6 DIY curing chamber conversions.

It starts invisible, and you don’t see it, but it’s there, and it helps with all the projects.

May Parma prosciutto factories I have visited have a controlled environment for the first 90 days. Then, if it’s raining, they close the windows. If it’s not raining, the windows are open.

Do note that the Po River, Emilia-Romagna region, Italy, does help create a slightly moist environment.

Tools, Equipment & Ingredients

Key Aspects:

1. Salt
2. Pink Curing Salt
3. Quality Meat (recipes below)
4. Accurate Scales (Important for Equilibrium Curing)
5. Casing & Muslin Cloth
6. Butchers Twine / Jute String
7. Mortar & Pestle or Spice Grinder
8. Natural Pennilicin
9. Butcher Twine or Jute (not essential)

1. Salt – Size & Type

Salt is the cornerstone of all food curing.

When I learned about Parma Ham, which many consider the ultimate dry-cured meat, I learned that it only uses two ingredients: a specific well-fed breed of quality pork and sea salt.

(other ingredients = time, patience, craftsmanship & a minimum of 12 months of humidity & temperature that has a favorable environment)

They have some kind of special approval based on strict guidelines and do not use any nitrates. Possibly, there are natural nitrates and other minerals already in the sea salt that have been used for hundreds of years, too.

The key to dry-cured meat is to use sea salt free of additives, anti-caking agents, or iodine.

That means sea salt or kosher salt works well. Trapani salt is very popular as a go-to salt in dry-curing communities.

There are so many different brands and shapes of salt because different salt shapes & brands have different volumes.

So a tablespoon of one brand of kosher salt may weigh differently from a tablespoon of another brand of kosher salt.

It can create significant variations when following a recipe.

Using accurate kitchen scales that go to 1 or 2 decimal places to measure exact quantities is essential compared to using measuring spoons or the salt box method, which I shall discuss below.

Accurate scales that can measure (0.X) 1 decimal place (ideally 2 decimal places (0.XX)

Accurate scales are probably the most important equipment if you use the equilibrium curing method because you will deal with very small amounts of salt, spices, and nitrates.

2. Pink Curing Salt

Pink curing salts, Prague powder, instant cure – it’s all the same

(Tenderquick is different – it has sugar/salt/nitrates/nitrites – from what I heard, not used it)

The difference is with No. 1 & No. 2 Curing Salt

No. 1 is for cured meat that will be fully cooked, a ‘short term’ under 30 days project like dry-cured bacon or pastrami,

No. 1 is:

• 93.75% salt
• 6.25% sodium nitrite

Pink Curing Salt No. 2 for long-term cured meats, prosciutto, Lonza, dry-cured salami, etc.

Nitrates slowly break down over time into nitrites, so by the time the transition has occurred (weeks or months), there are no nitrates left in the meat. Simple!

No.2 is:

• 89.75% table salt
• 6.25% sodium nitrite (wiki link)
• 4% sodium nitrate (wiki link)

Click here if you want to read more about pink-curing salt. I’ve often decided to leave pink curing salt out, like dry cured bacon, if I cook dry cured pink curing salt added meat at high temperatures. Do your research, please.

In Summary,

over 30 days of drying = Pink Curing Salt No. 2

under 30 days of drying = Pink Curing Salt No. 1

When doing equilibrium curing, pink curing salt is always added at a ratio of 0.25% to the total weight of the meat. Some instructions/directions go down to 0.2%.

This is a very small amount, so this is why accurate scales pay dividends.

For example, if the meat weighs 1000 g, I would add 2.5 g of curing salt. If this were pancetta, I would also use, for example, 2.5% sea salt for equilibrium curing to suit my taste preference (2% salt min for full curing is my rule).

Pink curing salt 2. is to be used to prevent the growth of bad bacteria like botulism.

3. Quality Fresh Meat

Fresh, well-looked-after animals lead to superior flavor outcomes, I think. Ideally, the meat you can source or trace back the origin should be used for meat curing. You get a better flavor out of something that’s been looked after with some passion.

The quality and freshness of the meat are very important to start with. Aged beef is not advisable for dry-curing meat since there may already be a level of undesirable bacteria present.

It’s also about an ethical choice, in my perspective.

4. Accurate Digital Scales (Important For Eq Curing)

As mentioned, accurate scales are important to get the correct amount of curing salt. If you are using the equilibrium method, it can work out the salt content to cure effectively and also to get the right match of saltiness to your taste buds. But the saltbox method is also fine.

So this is where the accurate kitchen scales go to 0.X or 0.XX becomes handy.

5. Casings & Muslin Cloth

What can be used as a ‘barrier’, to prevent/regulate the drying of cured meat:

• skin from the animal (like prosciutto)
• collagen sheets
• muslin cloth
• salt Preserved animal bungs (intestines)

Casing isn’t often necessary for regular kitchen fridge projects, which take less than a month.

For dry-cured meat projects that I put in my regular kitchen fridge, I have found that wrapping these can help to slow the drying out on the outside of the meat before hitting the target final weight.

Most regular fridges run at about 30-50% humidity, compared to a DIY curing chamber, which will be set at 60-70% humidity most of the time.

Muslin helps when you wrap it around the meat to hold some of the moisture and stop the outside from going hard. The term used is case hardening, and when this starts to happen, you may have meat that is dried on the outside but still moist on the inside.

Many dry-curing enthusiasts have this ‘case hardening’ issue. The easiest way to fix it is to vacuum pack the meat after it has hit the target weight. The moisture in the meat will equalize inside the vacuum-packed environment; just put it in the fridge for a week or two.

For regular fridge dry curing, you generally won’t get to the stage of case hardening; it will have to reach the target weight and hopefully be consumed way before it happens!

I prefer unbleached and natural products. Muslin cloth can be thicker or thinner; I’ve found thinner is better for this application. More recent, I’ve used collagen sausage casings that I cut open to wrap around small cured meats for drying.

6. Mortar & Pestle / Spice Grinder

I use a simple spice grinder (similar to a small coffee grinder) to get a proper, even coating and make the curing process as easy as possible.

The salt and spices become a powder that works well with equilibrium curing.

Or, if you want to use some arm work, a mortar, and a pestle, you have to grind it up.

For a few grinding tools, I wrote a page (near the bottom) about the ones I like here.

7. Happy Good Mold = Penicillin

So here is a picture of a good white penicillin mold that will prosper when you get the right conditions. You’ve probably seen it outside certain dry-cured salamis (DIY Curing Chamber).

Here are many varieties of good mold on my cured meats.

Trust Your Nose

Like any type of cooking, when it comes to dry-cured meats and curing meats, you must use your senses and some common sense to understand what’s happening.

What I mean by this is instead of taste, use your other senses.

There is a certain type of pleasant smell you get from the penicillin or powdery white mold that is on cured meats. This is a good sign, it protects the meat from foreign bodies.

Although this won’t be something you come across with short-term curing in a regular fridge, it takes a few weeks.

But it comes down to trusting your nose, I think, because it was designed to tell you when things are edible or not.

8. Butcher Twine or Jute (not essential)

You are mainly hanging dry-cured meat so that they don’t get in contact with anything. This minimizes bad bacteria contact with the meat.

You always want to avoid air pockets inside the meat, but when starting off with dry-cured meat, you stick with whole pieces of muscle, which means you don’t have these challenges.

For rolled pancetta, you need more technique to get the meat tight.

Tying can be pretty fancy for presentation, and it does add a lot to visual appeal. Tying is really useful if you’re using muslin to protect the meat.

Here is a link to the butchers’ twine I buy – 500 ft lasts a long time!

Easy Meat Curing Recipe Ideas

Duck / Pork / Beef Prosciutto Style Regular Fridge Project

Duck prosciutto is probably the easiest type of dry-cured product you can do. However, I think simple pancetta, which is also easily done in a regular fridge, is straightforward.

I have used different types of wild duck, which haven’t been as successful as farmed varieties, but I guess it just depends on your tastes. Wild venison has worked great.

The weight of the duck prosciutto or small pieces of pork belly suits a regular fridge-curing process. However, I’ve also used beef steak or under 200 g pork loins. All of these came out amazing and have become regulars in my repertoire.

Here is a breakdown of the recipe:

• 200g / 7 oz of meat
• 2-3% sea salt for equilibrium curing
• 0.25% pink curing salt no. 1

• Optional Spices for Duck- 1 clove, 1/3 cinnamon stick, orange zest, 0.5% pepper
• Option Spices for Beef 1% garlic, 1% sweet bay leaf, 0.5% juniper berry
• Optional Spices for Pork 0.5% pepper, 0.5% juniper, 0.5% nutmeg

Pork Pancetta Flavor for Regular Fridge

With whole spices, it can be helpful to make the spices fine; that’s where a spice grinder can be useful.

• 2.5% sea salt
• 2% black pepper
• 1 medium-sized garlic clove
• 0.2% nutmeg
• 0.2% dry thyme
• 1% brown sugar
• 0.5% juniper berries

Beef or Game Meat Braesola Style Regular Fridge

The classic bresaola has many spices; the main flavor is cinnamon and nutmeg. I use this spice mix with great success using my harvested wild game or any other type of red meat.

Here’s a breakdown of the percentage of spices that I use for this bresaola-style dry-cured meat. Don’t get too hung up on the spices; if you are missing a few, it will still taste awesome!

Recipe Breakdown

• 2.5% sea salt
• 0.2% juniper
• 0.4% pepper
• 0.2% dry thyme
• 2 dry bay leaf leaves
• 0.1% clove
• 0.1% cinnamon

How Long Does the Cured Meat Last?

As long as the outside has not hardened, dry-cured meat will last weeks. If the meat is fully dry-cured, as long as you keep it in the condition it prefers, i.e., 70-80% humidity or 11°C/50°F, it has the potential for many months of storage.

However, it will dry out more. More fat in the meat will slow this process since it contains much less moisture.

Vacpac and put it in your fridge; it can last years and get better with flavor! Just take it out and slice up whenever you crave it.

I’ve had 3-4 years for lamb and pork dry cured meats, vacuum packed in a regular kitchen frige. As long as all mold is removed and its dried before vac pack storing (here are various guidelines on storing cured meats I wrote about).

Thinly Slicing Dry Cured Meat

An accurate deli slicer is ideal! However, it’s not worth buying anything lost cost; it won’t slice accurately after thin.

I wrote a post on slicing; it can make a huge difference. I tried several knives, and this guide covers a lot about wafer thin-slicing! Please find that post here.

Additional Resources and Video Tutorial

Here is a video I made going over curing and drying at home.