The salt you use to cure meat depends on what you’re making and how long it needs to cure. Regular salt (sodium chloride) is the base of every cure, but it can’t do the job alone for most projects. You’ll typically need one of two specialty curing salts, known as pink salt #1 or pink salt #2, combined with a non-iodized base salt like kosher salt or sea salt.
Why Regular Salt Isn’t Enough on Its Own
Plain salt preserves meat by pulling moisture out of it. As the water level drops, bacteria lose the environment they need to multiply. The bacterium responsible for botulism, for example, needs a water activity level of at least 0.93 to grow. Salt drives that number down, making the meat inhospitable to dangerous microbes.
But salt alone doesn’t give cured meat its pink color, its distinctive tangy flavor, or its resistance to fat going rancid. For that, you need nitrite or nitrate, which are the active ingredients in curing salts. Nitrite is the real workhorse: it blocks botulism toxin production, locks in the bright red-pink color of ham, bacon, and salami, and prevents the “off” flavors that come from fat oxidation. Nitrate serves as a slow-release reservoir that converts into nitrite over weeks or months, which matters for long-cured products.
Pink Salt #1 (Prague Powder #1)
This is the curing salt most home curers reach for first. It contains 6.25% sodium nitrite and 93.75% regular sodium chloride, per FDA and USDA regulations. The mixture is dyed pink so you never accidentally confuse it with table salt, since pure sodium nitrite is toxic in large amounts.
Pink salt #1 is designed for products that will be cooked, smoked, or eaten within a relatively short time frame. Use it for bacon, ham, pastrami, corned beef, jerky, smoked sausage, and fish. In these products, the nitrite does its work quickly and doesn’t need to linger for months.
Pink Salt #2 (Prague Powder #2)
Pink salt #2 is built for the long game. It contains 6.25% sodium nitrite, 4% sodium nitrate, and 89.75% sodium chloride. The added sodium nitrate slowly breaks down into nitrite over time, thanks to naturally occurring bacteria in the meat. This gives you a sustained protective effect during weeks or months of air-drying.
You need pink salt #2 for any product that will be dry-cured and eaten without cooking. That includes prosciutto (which can age 12 to 36 months), bresaola (air-dried beef, typically 2 to 3 months), coppa or capicola (2 to 3 months), dry-cured salami and sopressata (4 to 12 weeks), pancetta arrotolata (4 to 8 weeks), and lonza (6 to 12 weeks). If the meat will hang in a curing chamber and eventually be sliced and eaten raw, pink salt #2 is the right choice.
Choosing Your Base Salt
Curing salts are used in tiny, precise amounts. The bulk of any cure recipe is plain salt, and which type you pick matters more than you might expect.
Kosher salt is the most popular choice among home curers. Its coarse, flaky crystals dissolve evenly and contain no additives. The name actually comes from the Jewish tradition of koshering, or curing, meat. One important note: kosher salt brands vary significantly in density. A cup of Morton kosher salt weighs considerably more than a cup of Diamond Crystal. If a recipe was developed with Diamond Crystal, you’d decrease the volume by 25% for Morton. If it calls for table salt, you’d increase the volume by 50% for Diamond Crystal. This is why weighing your salt on a kitchen scale is far safer than measuring by volume.
Sea salt works well too, particularly fine-grained varieties without added minerals. It behaves similarly to kosher salt when measured by weight.
Table salt is generally avoided. The iodine added to most table salt can give cured meat a metallic or bitter taste, and anti-caking agents can cloud brines. If table salt is all you have, look for a non-iodized version.
How Much Salt to Use
Modern home curing has largely moved toward a method called equilibrium curing, where you calculate salt as a percentage of the meat’s weight rather than packing it in excess salt. For whole-muscle cuts like pork belly or beef eye of round, the standard range is 2% to 3% salt by weight. A common starting point is 2.25% for whole-muscle equilibrium cures.
So for a 5-pound (2,270-gram) pork belly, you’d use roughly 51 to 68 grams of salt total. The curing salt (pink salt #1 or #2) is calculated separately, typically at a fixed ratio per pound of meat as specified on the package, and counts toward your total salt percentage. This method is forgiving because the meat can only absorb a set amount of salt, so it won’t become inedibly salty even if you leave it curing an extra day or two.
USDA Nitrite Limits
Federal regulations cap how much nitrite can go into cured products, and the limits vary by product and method. For injected or massaged bacon, the maximum is 120 parts per million (ppm) of sodium nitrite ingoing. Dry-cured bacon allows up to 200 ppm because some nitrite is lost during the longer curing process. Other cured products fall in similar ranges. When you use pre-mixed curing salts at the recommended ratios, you’ll stay well within these limits without needing to do ppm math yourself.
What About “Natural” or “Uncured” Products
Products labeled “uncured” or “no nitrites added” at the grocery store almost always use celery powder or celery juice as their curing agent. Celery is naturally high in nitrates, containing over 2,500 mg per kilogram in some cases. Bacteria in the meat convert those plant-based nitrates into nitrite, which then does the same preservation work as synthetic sodium nitrite.
The chemistry is identical. The nitrite molecule from celery powder is the same nitrite molecule in Prague powder. However, celery-based curing is less precise. Studies comparing celery powder sausages to those made with 150 ppm of sodium nitrite found that the antimicrobial activity of celery powders was not comparable to conventional nitrite. For home curers, pre-mixed curing salts offer more reliable and consistent safety.
Quick Reference by Project
- Bacon, ham, corned beef, pastrami, smoked sausage, jerky: Kosher or sea salt + pink salt #1
- Dry-cured salami, sopressata, coppa, bresaola, prosciutto, pancetta, lonza: Kosher or sea salt + pink salt #2
- Salt-preserved fish or short brines (under 2 weeks): Kosher or sea salt + pink salt #1
- Purely salt-cured products with no nitrite (salt cod, gravlax): Kosher or sea salt only, no curing salt needed
Weigh everything on a digital kitchen scale. Volume measurements introduce too much variability between salt brands, and with curing salts, precision is a safety issue, not just a quality one.