Free-Range Smoked Back Bacon

We home-cure our hams and bacons using the traditional slow dry-curing method of thoroughly and carefully applying the cure by hand to each piece before leaving it to cure; We don’t inject our hams or immerse them in brine for a quick-fix cure. Neither do we use cure-accelerators, colorants, colour-fixers or silica gel to make our hams absorb water to artificially increase their weight (all practices used by industrial ham and bacon manufacturers for the supermarkets) . Our dry-cure includes sea-salt, organic cane sugar and Sodium nitrite (E250). Excessive amounts of Nitrites and especially the more aggressive  Nitrates are unhealthy. We use the lowest possible Nitrite content as part of our dry-cure mix (50 ppm as opposed to 250ppm used by mass producers of ham for supermarkets) and approved by the Soil Association.  After curing and cooking, laboratory tests that we have had conducted demonstrate that the Sodium nitrite residue is reduced to 7ppm or less (less than in a stick of celery, or that you might have naturally in your saliva). Sodium nitrite is an important constituent in a curing salt as it controls those microbes which cause food poisoning.  Our ham and  bacon are ‘nitrite-lite’.