Beginner's Injection Brine Calculator question.

[senorkevin]

Should I place the meat into a container then add enough water to cover it, them remove the water and weigh it to give me the water in grams, then add the weight into the calc?

[wheels]

Calculate how much brine you will need. Measuring how much cold water it takes to cover the meat is a good way of working out how much is needed.

So Yes.

HTH

Phil

[senorkevin]

Sorry! After reading again I found that it says that!

[wheels]

No problem. If obtaining cure is a problem, you may be interested in this one which uses a minimum of brine cure:

http://www.localfoodheroes.co.uk/?e=768

Alternatively, one of the combination cures using injection plus dry curing - there's a tutorial for that also.

Phil

[RodinBangkok]

Why remove the water, we keep everything to one container. Place meat in container and put on scale then tare the scale, add water to cover calculate amounts based on water weight, add other ingredients based on water weight and mix with the water and meat in the same container.
You might not have a big enough scale to do this, but otherwise it works fine mixing the brine solids with the meat in the water. We use a Digi scale that has two weight heads connected to one computer, one up to 500 gms in .01 gm resolution, and the other head is 200 kg with .01 kg resolution. I can recommend this type of scale if your doing a lot of cure measurements, and medium size meat loads.

[senorkevin]

Where can I buy one of those?

[senorkevin]

I am currently boiling up the brine after using the calc. I just remembered that my cure #1 is at 7%.
From what I remember I need to add 10% less cure because of the higher level. Am I correct?

[RodinBangkok]

Where can I buy one of those?

Here is the web site, and a page for indicators. You then can choose platforms.

http://www.digisystem.com/products/category/006/

Ours is about 12 years old so the model does not show on the new models, but it can handle 2 platforms without changing connectors. I could not be happier with this unit over the years, its bullet proof and very dependable. A good investment for a commercial operation. They might have a distributor in mexico.

If your boiling, you might want to think about boiling your solids in a small quantity of water, then add that back into the bulk of the water, heating and then cooling a large volume is a lot of extra work if only to get whatever benefits you think your getting from boiling the first place...in some cases its beneficial for whole spices I guess, but otherwise, why boil would be my question. But thats me now, I'm pretty old school so there might be others that are adamant about boiling.

[NCPaul]

In Mexico I would boil the water.

[senorkevin]

I do boil the water, even though we have 2 water filters!

[senorkevin]

Do I use the same amount of cure #1 with nitrite @ 7% when using the calc?

[johngaltsmotor]

Yes, your earlier comment was almost correct. Because you are using cure#1 with 7% nitrite instead of 6% nitrite you will want to use 6/7ths as much (85%). So multiply the recipe amount times 0.85 and this is how much (7% nitrite) cure to use for the same result.