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this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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Asklemmy
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Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook
I'd really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.
I've recently been experimenting with curing meats, I've done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.
And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.
And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren't dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.
I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it's a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and...
When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I'll ever work with, and also doesn't scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I'm not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.
there are several of these from the usda!
https://nchfp.uga.edu/resources/category/usda-guide
they are really well made pdf's with a lot of good info on exactly what you're describing.
I make my own hot sauces and kraut.
I have a similar experience with some basic fermenting (e.g. kombucha, pickling). I'm growing cultures of microbes like yeast and bacteria and while I've been able to spot some obvious unwanted cultures on failed batches, there's a surprising absence of reputable info and unfortunately I've had to get by on the brewing equivalent of gym broscience, mostly on reddit, some of which I've spotted is misinformation. The SEO AI-generated articles plaguing search results don't help either.
They do publish pretty good information about home canning, though in batch sizes more and more of us aren't going to do because we're not putting up 10 acres worth of vegetables.