Bacon Musing

Implications of the below:
* 132F for 1.5-2 hours in the sous vide should be acceptable to both sterilize the meat and minimize moisture loss and fat rendering. We're mainly concerned about bacteria on the surface, right?
* Sous vide step probably wants to take place before any long-term drying, as e. coli gets more resistant to heat as moisture drops (up to a point at least).
* May be some value in doing a test on the sous vide to see how long it takes a piece of meat to hit 132 throughout after you put it in. Sterilization for the very interior only starts once that gets above temperature, though realistically the parts of the meat that will have pathogens are on the outside (except for trich., which will die very quickly).

NB: There's a question here regarding rate of fat rendering at given temperatures as well. 132 degrees for two hours looks sufficient for total sterilization, while 150 degrees looks able to accomplish that in minutes. 130 may be low enough that the fat doesn't actually render, but takes a while to work (probably 3-4 hours in the sous vide, to get up to temp and then adequately disinfect? That being said, bacterial concerns are probably restricted to the surface.

"The Book" (see below) also describes dry-curing as involving something resembling a drainage rack. This partly explains the constant reapplication of cure.

Link for ref:
https://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/magazine-archive1/februarymarch-2004/the-danger-zone-reevaluated/
D value here refers to the time required to get a 1-log decrease (base 10). The only one that worries me here is that e. coli in ground beef has a D-time of 40 minutes at 130; that drops by a factor of 10 at 135, so 132 degrees might be a good sweet spot here.

Doing some work in Excel - looks like you'd expect a high-end D value of 20 minutes at 132, so for E coli you're after 2 hours to get a 6-order kill rate.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2001-title9-vol2/pdf/CFR-2001-title9-vol2-sec318-10.pdf
(Elsevier basically ripped me out of $30 to get the article that linked that...)

So, 2 hours at 130 degrees should be easily enough to kill Trichinosis. Yay. That looks dated to at least 2001 (when trich cases were already going down a lot) so that should be fine.

Other things:
* Could be a benefit to slicing day by day rather than all at once. The pellicle will get thicker, but could/should be fine, and with the temperature low enough this may be enough to prevent spoilage completely. Possible that wrapping in foil will help to prevent it from getting too hard, though I suspect there's a limit to how thick the pellicle can actually get.
* Additional question here regarding why the cooked one doesn't spoil.

Based on "the book" (Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages) "bacon is dried for 1-2 hours at 122F, dampers are fully open" followed by "Bacon is smoked and cooked for 3 hours at 130F, dampers are 1/4 open. If trichinae-free meat is used the cooking may stop when the internal meat temperature reaches 132F, otherwise cook bacon to 140F." There's a bit of an internal contradiction there in that a 130F smoker can't hit either of those temperatures but w/e.
USDA limits on sodium nitrate in dry-cured bacon is 200ppm for "rind-off" and 180ppm for "rind-on." Rind-on is if the skin's still attached so NBD.
Apparently I've been roughly hitting if not undercutting that - 1lb of bacon should be 1.3g of Cure#1, so 700g should be about 2g of Cure #1, which is what we've got this time. So we're good.
At some point soon we can start adding sugar - interested to see what does to shelf life.
That's for belly bacon though.

There's a later page discussing loins - "usually pickle cured. They can be stitched pumped and then placed in cover pickle for 3-5 days, or only immersed in cover pickle for up to 10 days. After curing they are smoked and cooked to 142-152F." So Curing-wise we're probably fine, temp-wise we're being a bit cheeky.

The book does recommend doing the mixture in two goes, doing half of the dry cure on Day 1 then adding the other half on Day 7. That said, the recc is "2-2.5 days per kg" so in our case we should be fine.

There's a specific recipe for Canadian Bacon but the temps on that go way high, 3 hour smoke at 150F followed by a brief hold at 170F until the meat hits 154.

(Book also has some fun notes on jerky, which we can totally make at home)

Trichinosis is a mild concern but seems unlikely.

May have hit on one issue inside of the book - "after drying, bacteria become much more heat resistant."

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/meat-preparation/bacon-and-food-safety/CT_Index/!ut/p/a1/rVNdT8MgFP0tPvhIgH73sVZbrdpFN13bF8Na6DCW1kLmx6-XbjGaTbdpBg9AOOdyz7lcWMAMFoIseE0UbwV5Gs6F84BukIP9ECUjH0foIr2_GV2GIfLGtgbkWwCpucaPguHajO69NMYoND_5v4wA7eJPYQGLUqhOzWHOJJegbIWiQh0jrtdeUL1rCBfHqOvbuieNBERUQNJ-wUsqB3pHalpRyWuxPJW8gjlCBivLGQaOjRiwKPYBMVgFXN_zTFxZLvbLDfEb2e0wL9nDXaO_Dq_rIUk1B1ywFmY1VVqDfKG9hBlrW62GMKreACOlAnJOqdIXDSUKdD3tSL-sJsxmRHuzVP-NBLNw8nAhKvq68vJ7QgjrqQWNrfMkNdHIWgf8UO4VYEs9tz5hGTDXprpfgPh2AETjCY7tExy7Nhz_sUo7AroHDphahw7oHDrg3z1M9uhj_vj8XAS6G4cGfFX6a_6jHbvm7q7xHtmV_VSfOrdnLE0BmXnItLvF-4Q10-Do6APh5-F8/
Another interesting link, as is this one:
https://extension2.missouri.edu/g2528