Cure #1
Also known as Prague Powder #1, Insta Cure #1, pink cure
The everyday curing salt, 6.25 per cent sodium nitrite in ordinary salt, dyed pink, for cooked and shorter-cured products.
Cure #1 is the curing salt a home or small-scale curesmith reaches for most, at least in North America. It is 6.25 per cent sodium nitrite blended into 93.75 per cent salt and tinted pink so it can never be mistaken for table salt at the bench. That precise dilution is the point of it: nitrite must be dosed at a whisper, around 150 milligrams to a kilo of meat, and no one can weigh a whisper of a poison accurately. By carrying the nitrite in a manageable amount of salt, Cure #1 turns an impossible measurement into a simple one.
In use it has one rate worth committing to memory: a maximum of 0.25 per cent of the meat weight, which is 2.5 grams per kilogram, or near enough two level teaspoons to cure four and a half kilos, ten pounds, of mince. At that rate its 6.25 per cent nitrite delivers about 156 parts per million ingoing, the American legal ceiling for comminuted meats, first set in 1926 and unchanged since. Because Cure #1 is more than nine-tenths salt, those 2.5 grams add almost no seasoning, so the curesmith adds the rest of the salt, commonly 2 to 3 per cent, separately.
This is exactly where Cure #1 and a European nitrited salt part company, and confusing them is dangerous. Cure #1 is a concentrate used at 0.25 per cent on top of your salt; Colorozo and its kind are used at around 2.5 per cent as your salt. The nitrite dose comes out the same, but the rates differ tenfold, so the rate must always be matched to the product in hand and never carried across from one to the other.
Cure #1 carries no nitrate, so its nitrite is spent within days to weeks and it belongs to products that will be cooked or eaten young: bacon, cooked sausages, frankfurters, home-cured hams for the fridge, fresh salami eaten early. For anything aged for months, the nitrate reservoir of Cure #2, or of the European Salvianda, is needed instead. And the commonest, most dangerous error of all is to treat every pink or curing product as interchangeable: Cure #1 is not Cure #2, and neither is a complete blend such as Tender Quick. Substituting one for another by weight gives either a ruined product or an unsafe one.