The Cure · Side
Guanciale
- Advanced
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a sweet edge rounding the corners, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg pork jowl, skin on, glands and bruised meat cut away
- 45 g fine sea salt (3%)
- 4 g curing salt no. 2 (0.25%)
- 15 g dark brown sugar
- 12 g black pepper, coarsely cracked
- 4 g thyme
- 3 bay leaves, crumbled
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Square off the jowl so it dries evenly, then weigh it and scale the cure to that weight.
- Rub the cure into every face, seal in a bag or covered tray, and refrigerate 7 days at 4C (39F), turning daily.
- Wipe off the wet cure, pierce one corner and thread string through, then hang at 12-15C (54-59F) at about 70% humidity.
- Give it 3 to 5 weeks, until it has lost 30% of its weight and the lean seam at the thick end is firm under a thumb.
- Wipe any bloom off with a vinegar cloth, wrap in paper, and keep it in the fridge, cutting only what you need.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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