Tocino salado
Also known as Tocino Salado
Nationwide, Spain
Salt-cured pork back fat.
Overview
Tocino Salado is a firm white slab of back fat with skin, a clean salty aroma and no yellow rancidity or wet pockets.
Where it's from
How to recognise it
A firm white slab of back fat with skin, a clean salty aroma and no yellow rancidity or wet pockets. Yellow rancidity, sour brine, slime, exposed unsalted pockets or dark contamination are faults.
Origins and history
Tocino is the Spanish word for the seam of fat that lies beneath a pig's skin, and salting it is one of the oldest ways to keep that fat through the year. On the Iberian Peninsula the practice reaches back to the medieval centuries, when households preserved the fat from the winter slaughter so it would carry them into the lean months. The method is plain and dependable: a slab of back fat, usually left skin-on, is packed in coarse sea salt for a stretch of weeks, which pulls out moisture and firms the fat to a keeping texture. No nitrite is used, since pure fat holds no lean muscle for a cure to colour, so it stays white. This makes it a nationwide larder staple rather than a regional speciality, closer in spirit to Italian lardo than to bacon, and quite separate from the sweet, red Filipino tocino that borrowed the name during colonial rule. Salted back fat provided calories and cooking fat through the year and flavoured beans, stews and greens. Its simplicity made raw-material quality and clean storage especially important. Salted fat supplied frying medium, stew enrichment and concentrated energy long after the winter slaughter, especially in households where olive oil was scarce or expensive.
- Protection
- Unprotected.
- Seasonality
- The winter matanza.
Serving and cultural significance
Desalt when necessary, then cut small pieces into beans, stews, greens or bread dough. It is a seasoning fat rather than a charcuterie slice. Render slowly and add further salt only after the dish has cooked.
Recipe and cure
This is not a finished recipe. It is a window into how this meat is traditionally cured. Before you follow any process, please run it through one of our curing calculators, so the salt, cure and timings are right and safe for your own batch.
Make this — the measured Curesmith version →The cure below is the traditional reference. “Make this” opens the measured Curesmith home recipe, scaled to your batch.
Traditional or protected production
Tocino Salado is skin-on pork back fat preserved with salt. It is a fat cure rather than a whole-muscle meat cure, and the amount of salt used for packing is not the same as the salt absorbed by the finished product.
- Meat
- pork fat
- Cut
- back fat, skin-on
- Salt (%)
- 45
- Fermented
- No
- Smoked
- No
- Maturation
- salt-box pack
- Basis
- per 1000 g green meat
- Style
- Salt-cured back fat
Ingredients
- coarse sea salt45% · 450 g/kg
- sugar15% · 150 g/kg
Notes
- A more efficient way of curing this product is using the EQ Method. No more than 2.5% salt to meat weight is required. Use our whole-muscle EQ curing calculator to work out proper ratios and curing times.
- The salt-box figure is a packing amount, not uptake.
In the Codex
What this product teaches, and where to read more.
Temple. Roof, Water Activity