by St-Anthony » Fri Aug 16, 2013 12:16 pm
Excellent article JerBear, as for myself, I do use liquid smoke for my bacon instead of a smokehouse because I find that a convection oven gives me a better finished product. With my convection oven, I get a uniform color all around the slab, I can control the temperature perfectly so my product has looked and tasted the same for years (hopefully with a few improvement). I have always known the anti-cancer genic properties of sodium erythorbate and ascorbic acid. I have never used sodium nitrite without ascorbic acid. I have never used sodium erythorbate because it used to be very expensive (years ago back in the 80s) and the minimum amount that I could buy made it too expensive for me. As you know, the amount of ascorbic acid to be used is 1/8 of a tea spoon per 5 pounds of meat or 1 litre of brine so you can imagine that a 5kg bag of erythorbate would have lasted me for years!. The last time that I put in an order of cure, I asked what was the price of sodium erythorbate because I was running out of ascorbic acid and to my surprise, I bought a 2 kg bag of the stuff for under $10! (way cheaper than ascorbic acid!) I haven't used it yet because my bottle of ascorbate is not empty yet. I am curious to see if it stabilises the colour as good as ascorbic acid.