A Bit Confused

[mrphilips]

no sir, it's exactly what i was talking about, and pretty much what i was thinking.
at this level of moisture i'm definitly still talking about a cure - a wet cure. to me, a brine is much more watery than this.

but i am under the impression that with the added water in the liquids, the concentration of salt and sugar in the liguid would have to be greater as the water interupts the "direct contact" normally found in the dry cure...
two starts from the same book make for interesting reads... Ruhlman's has the basic dry cure for bacon as you know, but it also has a wet cure that uses some maple syrup. comparitively, i have to imagine that these two formulations contains more or less the same amount of salt (and nitrite), though the maple one is probably sweeter.

your idea of counting sodium mgs is about as far as i got for the salt vs salty-liquid calculation (though i suspect you would need a greater percent just to account for the addition of water)... but i have no idea how to count the sugar content from an ingredient label.

perhaps comparing the two ruhlman recipes for the same amount of pork would give approximate sugar vs sweet-liquid math (if one assumes that honey and syup have equal sweetnesses)?

[Habanero Smoker]

I didn't mention anything about water, I stated liquids. So it would be the total amounts of liquid, that would include your soy sauce, honey and syrups. If water is needed to make the proper amount of brine, then you can add that.

Sorry, I jsut took for granted that you were familiar with a wet cure recipes. When you make a  wet brine would would have to add much more cure #1 and salt. For example, for 1 gallon of liquid I will use about 3 ounces of cure #1, and about 7 ounces of salt. That is why I stated that you should not use the basic cure, and make a wet brine and add the cure #1 to it. When you prepare a brine like this it has more direct contact then a dry cure. More cure is coming into contact with the surface of the meat, and for small to average size cuts wet curing is faster then a dry cure.

I guess what you want to do is make a paste, in that case some of the cure will be suspended and it may or may not come into contact with the meat. I haven't experimented with that.

[mrphilips]

i think we've just crossed a few terms, i am quite familiar with brines, which is what i'd call something with a gallon of water in it.
when i mention water, i just mean the extra liquid in an ingredient this ins't the salty or sweet component... the stuff that makes soy sauce a sauce OTHER than the salty, sweet flavours in it.
that's the stuff i'm thinking will dilute the added cure ingredients... so assuming you calculated one for one by counting the mgs of sodium in the dry cure' salt, i'm guessing you would still want more than that in it's soy sauce equivalent, as the salt in the soy sauce is more dilute than pure salt.

yes, i'm talking essentially about pastes (what i meant by a wet cure - maybe chose the wrong term there).

well, i'm about to try a few types right now - a savory/sweet maple with onion and galic, and a black pepper/rosemary/honey/mustard one... starting with the ruhlman maple version, but modifying it. neither will use soy sauce as per our example, so aren't really a test of this last conversation, but if they're successful i'm going to try a soy and lemongrass one.