Ask A Sausage Maker: How Much Cure Do You Actually Need?
Ask a Sausage Maker is an educational series from PS Seasoning where Certified Master Meat Crafter and Executive Chef Jed Hanson answers the questions home processors ask most. No filler, no fluff. Just straight answers from someone who's spent a career in the craft.
Q&A 3: I bought one of your B-Units, but my batch is smaller than the recipe on the package. How do I figure out how much cure to use?
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Cure Is the One Ingredient You Shouldn't Eyeball
In smoked and semi-dried products - snack sticks, summer sausage, jerky, smoked sausage, hams, bacon - cure helps set color, retain flavor, and control pathogens. It's a regulated ingredient. Using too much is a safety issue, so guessing isn't a good idea.
Where the Math Goes Wrong
PS Seasoning bulk seasonings that require cure ship with either Speed Cure, Maple Cure, or jerky cure - pre-measured to a 25-pound meat block. If you run a standard batch, the calculation is already done for you.
If your intended batch isn't 25 pounds, there can be some tricky math. Seasoning amount per pound varies based on the ingredients of the seasoning. The cure, on the other hand, is a fixed amount per pound, but varies if it's Speed Cure or Maple Cure. It can get confusing - and expensive. If you have to throw out a batch because you over-cured, that's real money at today's meat prices.
The Calculator Removes the Variable
PS Seasoning's Seasoning, Cure and Water Calculator takes the guesswork out of scaling: enter your seasoning selection and batch size (raw meat weight), and it returns the exact seasoning, cure, and water amounts you need. "Our goal is to help our customers avoid waste and get more yield," Chef Jed says.
Toggle between pounds, ounces, and grams to get the recommended measurements. Why do we use weight instead of volume measurements? It's important to getting it right.
"A kitchen scale is an important tool in the sausage and home meat crafting process," says Chef Jed. "Volume metrics like cups and tablespoons do not actually match the weight-based calculations used to optimize seasoning and cures to meat. Also weights scale predictably and don't have to be rounded to match standard measuring spoons."
While the fundamentals of sausage making haven't changed in generations, what has is the cost of getting things wrong and the ability to control more variables of your yield. We are excited to help make things easier with our meat block calculator.
Try the Meat Block Calculator →
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