Curing bacon with a wet brine, without nitrates

Question

When making bacon, many of the recipes call for a dry brine using curing salt with nitrates. I've read that it is possible to use a wet brine without the curing salt with the nitrates and just use Kosher salt (or some other salt). Is this possible and safe to use just kosher salt and water? From my understanding curing salt with nitrates can be toxic, but also protects against botulism but I'm still looking for a safer alternative.

Answer

Salt inhibits bacterial growth mainly by drawing moisture out of the meat. A wet cure (brine) would be substantially less effective at this than a dry cure, unless you add much more salt to your brine and, also, you take the extra step of drying the meat afterwards. Besides, the texture of the final product is likely to be substantially different, possibly not in a good way.

As you alluded, potassium nitrate (a/k/a saltpeter) is used in cures because, strangely, it does indeed stop the growth of Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that causes botulism. Other salt cures do not have this property, which might explain why some recipes call for adding a little powdered ascorbic acid to the salt. Hopefully, however, you are not planning to leave your bacon in a vacuum-sealed bag at room temperature, so this should not be a major factor in which cure recipe you use. I would be far more concerned about generating carcinogenic nitrosamines from frying nitrate-laden meat.

For extensive discussions, see the USDA/FSIS bacon fact sheet and the University of Georgia smoke-cure fact page, as well as the University of Minnesota's fact page on nitrites.

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