Work out the salt. Then go and cook.
Three calculators for salting meat at home. They give grams, they say what the percentage is a percentage of, and every safety figure names the paragraph it came from.
Search for how much salt goes in a turkey brine and the first page of results will tell you 1%, 3% and 8%. None of them is lying. They are measuring against different things — one against the water, one against the meat, one against both — and almost none of them says which.
So every page here states its basis next to the field, in words. And it keeps apart the two kinds of number that get mixed up everywhere else:
- How salty is a matter of taste. No authority regulates it, which is exactly why everyone's figure differs and everyone is right.
- How cold, how long, and when plain salt stops being enough is not a matter of taste. Those have published sources, and we name them.
Where plain salt stops
Salt the meat and cook it — within two days, cold throughout — and ordinary salt is all you need. Cold smoking, air-drying a whole muscle for weeks, fermenting a sausage, or any cure longer than two days is a different process with a different risk, and that is what the curing calculator is for.
We would rather say “we do not give a number for this” than guess. Cold-smoked fish is one such case, and it is marked as one on the page where it comes up.
About
Built by the people behind SaltCure. The curing numbers come from 9 CFR part 424; handling and temperature from USDA guidance and the FDA Food Code. Those rules are written for inspected plants and do not govern a home kitchen — we use them because in a calculation that can make somebody ill, a published number beats a forum post. Nothing here certifies anything you make.
A brine finishes overnight. A cure does not.
SaltCure runs the same arithmetic on your phone and keeps the log for the batches that take weeks: reminders to turn it, weigh-ins, weight loss against the band for that product. Free, offline, no account.
