Just doing my second pork belly into bacon, again using the river cottage curing book. I've done one load of sausages in the past and now looking to expand into more variations including salami, chorizo etc and trying to decide whether to use nitrates/nitrites, ie cure 1/2 etc in the recipes.
The River Cottage book says that they don't use them, several places online suggest it's not 'real' charcuterie if you use them and then there's many others that say you should use them for food safety reasons.
We raise our own pigs naturally, and I'm building a curing/drying fridge to be able to control the temp/humidity of the environment (although the current slab of bacon is hanging in the woodshed at the moment) and I'm interested to hear other people's thoughts on why you should/shouldn't use the cures with nitrates/nitrites in them and particularly from folks that don't use them and whether they've had any issues with that.
Thanks.