Prague Powder #1 is the common name for a curing blend of salt and sodium nitrite, dyed pink so that nobody mistakes it for ordinary table salt. It is used for short cures, the kind measured in days rather than months, which is exactly what bacon is. If you have read a bacon recipe online and been sent off to buy pink curing salt, that is the product being described, and it is doing the same job as the cure sachet in a bacon kit: protecting the meat through the days it spends in the fridge.
Here is what the pink is for, how it differs from the cure we supply, and why our kit does not ask you to weigh anything.
Why is curing salt dyed pink?
Purely so you can tell it apart. A curing blend looks almost identical to fine table salt in a jar, and it is emphatically not a seasoning: it belongs in a cure, in the quantity a recipe specifies, and nowhere near the salt cellar on the table. The pink dye is a visual warning that this tub is different, and it is the reason the stuff is universally called pink curing salt even though the colour tells you nothing about the chemistry.
The dye also has nothing to do with Himalayan pink salt, which is a rock salt used as ordinary seasoning and contains no curing agent at all. The two get muddled constantly because both are pink and both come in small tubs. They are not interchangeable in either direction. If a recipe wants a curing salt, rock salt will not do the job. If a recipe wants seasoning, curing salt is absolutely not the answer.
Practical upshot: if you keep a tub of curing salt in the house, label it, keep it well away from the cooking salt, and keep it out of reach of children.
What does Prague Powder #1 actually do?
The nitrite in it protects the meat across the days a cure takes, while salt is drawing moisture out and the pork is sitting in the fridge slowly becoming bacon. It is also what gives cured meat its familiar pink colour and its particular savoury, cured flavour, as distinct from the flavour of pork that has simply been salted.
The number in the name distinguishes it from curing blends intended for long projects, the sort that hang for months. Bacon is not one of those. A side of belly cures in days and is then air dried, so a short-cure blend is the right tool.
What we will not do here is give you percentages or dosages. Curing quantities are recipe-specific, they depend on the weight and the cut and the method, and a number lifted from a blog and applied to a different piece of meat is precisely how people get this wrong. Use the quantity your recipe gives you, and use a recipe that was written for the product you actually have.
How does it compare with our bacon kit cure?
Our bacon making kit contains a traditional dry cure: a mix of salt and sugar with sodium nitrite (E250) and sodium nitrate. So it is the same family of thing, with two differences that matter at home.
- It is already measured. The cure comes in the right quantity for the recipe in the booklet, so there is no weighing, no scaling and no arithmetic. That removes the step where most home curing goes wrong.
- It is a complete cure, not a component. Sugar is in the mix to balance the salt and help the bacon colour in the pan, and the kit's three seasonings (pancetta, fennel and juniper, and chilli and garlic) are designed around it.
If you already own a tub of pink curing salt, nothing here says you should not use it. You will need a recipe written for it, and your own scales. The kit exists for the other case: you want to cure bacon this weekend and you would rather not start by buying a tub of curing salt, a set of jeweller's scales and a lot of conflicting internet advice.
Does the cure make bacon safe on its own?
No, and this is worth being straight about. The cure is the centrepiece, but it works alongside the rest of the method rather than instead of it.
Start with fresh pork belly you would happily roast that evening. Rub the cure in evenly, over every surface, because a patchy rub gives you a piece that is properly cured at one end and soft at the other. Keep the meat refrigerated for the whole process, the curing days and the air drying afterwards. Do not reduce the cure because you are worried about salt, because the cure is the preservation rather than the seasoning. And always cook the bacon through before you eat it.
Then the levers you do have on saltiness: rinse the excess cure off thoroughly at the end of the curing time and pat the meat dry, and if a batch still comes out too salty, soak it in cold water for an hour before drying. Do not be tempted to leave the meat in the cure longer than the booklet says, which is a common cause of salty bacon.
What about jerky and biltong?
Neither needs a curing salt of any kind. Our jerky and biltong kits use no cure at all, just seasoning blends and, for the biltong, cider vinegar. Drying is what preserves them, helped by salt and by the vinegar in the biltong marinade, so nothing in this article applies to those kits. If the idea of buying curing salts puts you off making your own meat entirely, dried beef is the place to start.
Pink curing salt FAQs
Is Prague Powder #1 the same as pink Himalayan salt?
No. Prague Powder #1 is a curing blend of salt and sodium nitrite, dyed pink so it is not mistaken for table salt. Himalayan pink salt is ordinary rock salt for seasoning and contains no curing agent, so the two are not interchangeable.
Do I need to buy pink curing salt to use your bacon kit?
No. The kit includes a traditional dry cure of salt and sugar with sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate, measured for the recipe in the booklet, so there is nothing extra to buy and nothing to weigh.
Why is curing salt coloured?
So it cannot be confused with cooking salt. It looks like fine table salt otherwise, and it is meant for cures in recipe-specified quantities rather than for seasoning food at the table.
How much curing salt should I use?
Whatever quantity your recipe specifies for the exact cut and weight you are curing. We do not publish dosages, because a figure taken from one recipe and applied to a different piece of meat is how home curing goes wrong.
Can I cure bacon without any nitrite at all?
Salt-only cures exist, but they give a different product with a greyer colour, a different flavour and a shorter life, and they are not a swap inside our kit's timings. Our jerky and biltong kits, by contrast, use no cure in the first place.
If you would rather skip the tubs and the scales, our bacon kit is part of the range of meat making kits.
