Sodium Nitrate

Sodium nitrate is one of the two ways nitrate is delivered to cured meat, and the one built into the American Cure #2. Like all nitrate it is inert in itself, a reservoir that the meat's bacteria reduce slowly to the nitrite that actually cures, so everything said of nitrate is what sodium nitrate does: the slow, renewed protection and the matured flavour of a long dry cure.

It carries a history of its own, separate from the stable-scraped potassium saltpetre of Europe. Vast natural beds of sodium nitrate in the Atacama desert made Chile the source of the world's saltpetre through the nineteenth century, the so-called Chilean saltpetre or Chile nitrate, mined and shipped in enormous quantity for fertiliser, gunpowder and curing alike, until synthetic nitrogen fixation broke the trade in the twentieth century. The name Chile saltpetre still clings to it.

In curing today it is additive E251, and it does its work at the same slow, cool timescale as any nitrate, which is why it belongs to Cure #2 and to long dry-cured products and is kept out of quick or cooked ones. It differs from potassium nitrate only in the salt it is paired with, sodium rather than potassium; in the meat the nitrate ion behaves the same. Its limits track those set out under nitrate.