Brining clarification

[Northern_Smoke]

I am hoping someone can shed some light on this. If you were to brine/cure a ham, all the formulas have large quantities of each ingredient and say it's good for up to 25 pounds. Let's say I want to do 5 pounds. How do you cut the recipe down for a much smaller batch. My understanding is you can't just make 1/5th of the brine.

I have noticed that when you dry cure, most recipes have the ingredients broken down per pound of meat. Wet curing seems like you make enough for a certain amount but nothing clear for smaller batches.

[FLBentRider]

The way I understand brining, or wet curing, as long as you have enough liquid to cover the meat you are good. So if the brine recipe makes 10 gallons and is good for 25lbs of ham (yum!), then you can scale it down to 3-5 gallons (or whatever size container you have that will fit your ham). The ham needs to be able to "free float" in the container with brine around it, not crammed in there so tight you need a crowbar to get it out. Most ham recipies call for injecting as well, so there is a good amount of cure delivered directly inside the meat as well.

I'll look for the post, but I think I did mine in a 3 gallon zip bag.

[ArnieM]

If you're gonna do it in a pot of some sort ...

Put the meat in the pot.  Add water to cover.  Remove the meat.  Measure the amount of water that's left.  That's how much brine you have to mix up.

Brine will scale easily.  My simple-minded base is one gallon of water, one cup of salt and 1/2 cup of sugar.  This will scale up or down and of course you can add any other spices you like.

[Northern_Smoke]

The way I understand brining, or wet curing, as long as you have enough liquid to cover the meat you are good. So if the brine recipe makes 10 gallons and is good for 25lbs of ham (yum!), then you can scale it down to 3-5 gallons (or whatever size container you have that will fit your ham). The ham needs to be able to "free float" in the container with brine around it, not crammed in there so tight you need a crowbar to get it out. Most ham recipies call for injecting as well, so there is a good amount of cure delivered directly inside the meat as well.

I'll look for the post, but I think I did mine in a 3 gallon zip bag.

So you are saying that if you cut the liquid for your wet cure in half, you can cut the spices and cure itself in half to match?

[ArnieM]

Let's be careful with terminology.  There's brine and there's cure.  Please clarify, for me at least, if you're talking about a salt brine or something like a #1 cure.  I don't want to steer you wrong.

[FLBentRider]

The way I understand brining, or wet curing, as long as you have enough liquid to cover the meat you are good. So if the brine recipe makes 10 gallons and is good for 25lbs of ham (yum!), then you can scale it down to 3-5 gallons (or whatever size container you have that will fit your ham). The ham needs to be able to "free float" in the container with brine around it, not crammed in there so tight you need a crowbar to get it out. Most ham recipies call for injecting as well, so there is a good amount of cure delivered directly inside the meat as well.

I'll look for the post, but I think I did mine in a 3 gallon zip bag.

So you are saying that if you cut the liquid for your wet cure in half, you can cut the spices and cure itself in half to match?

Yes.

[Northern_Smoke]

Sorry...I am talking about cure. Brining I understand but to adjust for wet curing I am unsure of. Sorry for my previous confusing post.

[Habanero Smoker]

You do have to make enough to cover the meat, and usually covering the meat with the brine is enough brine to cure the meat. To make sure you you have enough brine the weight of the liquid should be at least 50% of the green weight of the meat (it's actually around 40 some odd percent, but 50% is easier to work with). So for 5 pounds, you can scale the recipe down to as little as 1.5 quarts, if that is enough to cover the meat. You can use larger amount of brine; whether you have 1.5 quarts or 10 gallons of the brine, the 5 pound piece of meat will cure the same.

One pint of water equals about one pound, one gallon of water equals about 8 pounds (8.35 pounds). Though you want a big enough container, you want to make sure that that the meat is fully submerged, so my may have to weigh it down by placing a heavy plate on top. For a 5 pound piece; that's pretty small, you can inject before submersing the meat but it is not necessary.

[Northern_Smoke]

Thanks for the help everyone and a special thanks to ArnieM for taking the time to help me out over the phone. :)