Home-cured meats – off-the-scale delicious
Making your own bacon and salt beef gives you the chance to avoid the nitrates and nitrites of the industrially processed product – but can you keep it pink?
I discovered domestic curing in an absolutely stunning book, Salt, Sugar, Smoke by Diana Henry, where there’s a recipe for salt beef without which my adult life would have been immeasurably poorer. The beauty of home-curing is twofold. For some reason, it is off-the-scale delicious. Better still, you end up with tons of meat, more than you could ever justify buying in a shop.
But cured meats are steadily becoming infamous as a lurking cancer risk on the scale of tobacco. Meat, generally, wreaks havoc upon your colon (red meat is associated with cancer risk if you eat it in large amounts), and a meta-study in 2011 found that cured meats could increase your risk of colon cancer even if you just like the occasional slice of ham. And slices of ham, like cloves of garlic, are almost never consumed in ones. There is also evidence of a breast cancer risk. The World Health Organization places bacon in the same category as asbestos, alcohol and arsenic.