It’s my understanding that cure #1 doesn’t activate till smoking / cooking. Protects the meat from bacteria growth during slow or cold smoking.

Curing regularly takes place at low temperatures. It is common to cure meat at refrigerator-temperatures, and this is regularly done to hams, bacon, and sausage.

One of the benefits of curing meat is that bacterial growth is inhibited when the meat temperature is raised to the “danger zone”, between 40 degrees and 140 degrees, i.e. when smoking.

I recently made a 25 lb batch of kielbasa. I used the kielbasa spice package that was for 25 lbs. Followed the recipe to the letter, but the sausage is way too salty to eat.

Any ideas what could have went wrong? I have another spice package for 25lb of Polish, but I dont want to ruin any more meat.

Please help!

If you were using a premixed spice pack and did not make any adjustments, then we should be able to assume the salt content was probably correct.

If the salt content is correct, the only other thing that can go wrong is uneven distribution of the spices into the meat mixture.

How did you mix the spices into your meat? Hand mixing or mechanical mixing? If you dumped the whole spice pack into the mixing container, its possible you did not get the spices mixed evenly in the meat, which could make some parts saltier/spicier than other parts of the meat mix which would be correspondingly blander.

If adding dry spices, I like to sprinkle them in slowly while mixing the meat to help get everything dispersed evenly.

If I mix the spices in water first, I will do it in a blender and make slurry, then add the slurry into the meat slowly while its mixing.

Another thing that can potentially make sausage or cured meat saltier is if it gets too dry while smoking. Removing the water from the meat essentially concentrates the salt.