Cure: Meat Curing Calculator

Home curing, measured properly.

Cure works out exactly how much salt, curing salt, and sugar your batch needs — for the cut in front of you, at the weight you actually have, down to the gram. No scaled-up recipe that assumes a five-pound belly. No guessing.

BUILD THE RECIPE

Start from a preset — pork belly bacon, Canadian bacon, ham, pastrami, corned beef, bresaola, coppa, guanciale, salami, smoked sausage, gravlax, cold-smoked lox, brined chicken or turkey — or build a custom cure from scratch. Enter your weight and thickness and Cure does the rest: equilibrium salt percentages, curing salt to the gram, sugar, and an estimated cure time based on the geometry of the piece.

STAY INSIDE THE LIMITS

Every formulation is checked against USDA FSIS ingoing nitrite and nitrate limits before you mix anything. Different products have different ceilings — 120 ppm for immersion bacon, 156 for comminuted, 625 for dry-cured whole muscle — and Cure applies the right one for what you are actually making, then tells you where you landed and why.

When something is off, it does not just refuse. It explains what went wrong, offers a corrected alternative, and lets you decide.

KNOW WHICH SALT YOU HAVE

The most dangerous mistake in home curing is confusing a concentrate with a complete mix. Prague Powder #1 at Tender Quick's rate is roughly ten times any legal nitrite limit. Tender Quick at Prague Powder's rate cures almost nothing at all. The gap runs about twelvefold in both directions.

Cure handles both families, asks which one is on your bag, and includes plain-language explainers on Cure #1 versus Cure #2, concentrates versus complete mixes, and how to read a label you have never seen before. Whatever your supplier calls it — Prague Powder, Instacure, DQ cure, Pökelsalz, NPS, sel nitrite, or just "pink curing salt" — it is the nitrite percentage that matters, and Cure asks for it.

FOLLOW THE BATCH

Save a batch and track it through cure, rinse, and dry. Log weights as it hangs, watch the chart climb toward your target loss, and get a notification when the cure time is up. Live Activities keep an active batch on your Lock Screen; a Home Screen widget shows what is going on at a glance. Add a photo and notes, then keep the whole thing in your archive so next year's batch starts from what worked.

Batches are searchable from Spotlight, and Siri and Shortcuts can start a calculation or log a drying weight without opening the app.

BUILT FOR THE WAY THIS ACTUALLY WORKS

- Equilibrium and traditional time-based curing, with the app telling you which one you are doing
- Gram-accurate figures, with volume estimates clearly marked as estimates
- Mandatory rinse steps flagged where the method requires them
- Metric and imperial throughout
- Everything stored on your device — no account, no sign-in, no tracking

A NOTE ON SAFETY

Cure is an educational tool for home curing, not professional food safety advice. Curing salts contain sodium nitrite, which is toxic in