How long to Brine cure a pork butt?

You trying to do buckboard bacon?

I’ve injected a 20 pound ham (about as big as a basketball) and let it soak for 3 days to be sure.

I’ve also put pork loins in brine (without injecting) and it took 4 days to reach the middle. And the diameter is smaller than a butt.

Inject it first. It shoots the brine straight to the middle and also creates holes in the meat that help the brine get into the meat. Just make your brine and inject the hell out of it, then cover it with brine to soak.

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Porkstrami, and thank you for the feedback.

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I've had something similar called a tasso roast. Cured butt is awesome. Are you seasoning it similar to beef pastrami?

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Porkstrami

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Sounds awesome. Do you mind documenting some of the process and posting it on here?

Pastrami is pretty easy to make. I encourage everyone to try it.

Usually made with brisket, you just find a recipe online for a brine with cure, let the meat soak in the cure for a few days.

As I said earlier, injecting it will speed the process up. A brisket can cure easily since it's not as thick but a pork loin, butt, or ham will take many days if not injected.

Then you pull it out the cure and give it a peppercorn rub and smoke it.

That's all there is to it.

If you know how to smoke the meat, then the toughest part really is to make sure you have a large enough container and refrigerator space to brine.

Using pork is interesting. I'm sure it will taste like a peppered ham. A butt seems like a rather large diameter cut and pretty fatty for pastrami, but I see no reason why it would taste bad. It may be odd to slice and you may need to cut some fat out, but no big deal. I like the idea. A pork loin would be ideal for slicing.


Link to a ham thread where you can find a general recipe for brine/cure.

I thought I’d give you all an update.

Final product came out great. Like another poster mentioned the final product did taste a bit like ham, but still took on that pastrami flavor.



This was after a 10 day brine. The brine was typical, consisting of water, garlic, sugar, salt , bay leaf and black peppercorn.

The brine calculator I used suggested 12 days and as you can see from the center of the shoulder 10 days was just a little short. No biggie.

Once out of the brine I patted it dry and rubbed it with equal parts coriander and black pepper. Don’t forget to toast your spices! I then smoked the meat using a combo of apple and hickory chips until it reached 170. I brought it in and let it cool overnight to be prepped for slicing.



Another shot of the product after I sliced half of it with my deli slicer. I experimented with different thicknesses and found the thinner slices were best.



Putting it all together, I used a pumpernickel Rye bread. I made a homemade russian dressing with Mayo, chili garlic sauce, sriracha, lemon juice, worchestire and horseradish. Added Swiss cheese and Sauerkraut.

All in all Id do it again especially with the prices of brisket being high as giraffe poonani. The flavor was spot on and tender.

When curing, it does not depend on how strong the brine is. It depends on whether or not the cure gets to all parts of the meat. Brining is not the same as curing, although you do brine when you cure. Curing is using sodium nitrite to change the meat it touches.

This picture is a great example and a great way to understand how curing works. The butt was soaked in brine (with cure). It takes many days for the brine (with or without cure) to soak into the center of a large piece of meat.

Cure (sodium nitrite) changes the color and flavor of the meat. You can see this in the picture. The part that did not get cure looks like a pork roast. The part that got cure looks like a ham (for lack of a better example). This is what curing is. When some of this board likes to laugh at my pork belly isn't bacon stance, this is the reason I say that. You can see the difference in his photo. The cured meat is NOT the same as the uncured meat. It's a scientific fact and this picture shows it.

This also shows that if you are brining a butt without cure, and you brine it for 24 hours as mentioned above by a poster, you will only get the outer inch or two actually brined. The inner butt will take 12 days for brine to reach it. If you do not brine the butt for 12 days, your brine is not reaching the center of the butt...unless you inject it.

This is why I suggest injecting the meat and then brining for a period of time. If he would have injected the butt, the brine with the cure would have been in the center of the butt immediately. Processors when making cured hams inject the cure. They don't let hams sit in vats for 2 weeks. They wouldn't have time nor space to do this.

Let's discuss what brining is (with or without cure). Brining flavors the meat and adds moisture to the meat. In basic terms, water molecules (H2O) attach to the proteins in the meat with the help of salt (NaCl). So a brine must contain salt. The salt makes the meat hold the water and the water carries the flavor you add to the brine into the meat with it.

As evident in the picture, it takes 12 days for brine to get into the center of a pork butt. That center part did not get brine. So if you brine for say 1 hour, only the surface is getting the brine. It takes time for the brine to get into the meat, depending on how thick it is. Again, this is where injecting helps.

It's also beneficial to know that meat proteins can only hold a certain amount of water. So once X% of water is attached to the proteins, that's it.

The picture is awesome and can explain a lot of the science. To the OP, thanks for sharing the process.

Just grab an injector needle like you would inject a turkey. Make your brine. Then inject the hell out of it until you get tired of injecting. Inject it all over - center, middle, sides, etc.

Then let it sit in the same brine like you did for maybe 2-3 days to give it time to soak some more brine in.

Injecting also puts holes in the meat so the brine will have an easier path to get to the inside. So giving it a couple of days helps.

As I said, inject the hell out of it to be sure you are getting the brine all throughout the meat. The meat will not hold more brine than it is physically capable of, so don't worry about over injecting. As long as your brine isn't over-seasoned, there's no worry.