Salt Pork Recipes

Salt pork is made from pork bellies, cured with salt as a preservative and flavoring.

Salt pork is similar to bacon but not smoked like bacon. It is a lot fattier and of course saltier than bacon. Salt pork was once used as a common shipboard ration and today still finds uses in traditional American cuisine, particularly Boston baked beans.

Salted pork is commonly used to add flavor to boiled vegetables in a traditional New England boiled dinner. It generally must be blanched or rendered before being used.

Salt pork is often confused with fatback, which is a slab of fat that runs along the back of a pig. You can make fatback into lard, cut it into barding strips to wrap around lean roasts, or use it to line terrine or pâté pans.

As the cut of meat used for salt pork is almost entirely fat, this piece is seldom used alone for the table. Occasionally, it is broiled to be served with some special food, such as fried apples, but for the most part it is used for larding - that is, slices of it are laid across the surface of meat or fish that are lacking in fat and that therefore cook better and have a more flavor when fat in some form is added.

Salt pork is usually bought by the pound and then sliced as needed for cooking purposes, as it can be kept refrigerated for up to a month as long as it is tightly wrapped.

Salt Pork Uses

Baked Beans with Pork
A simple but tasty recipe for homemade baked beans and pork using bacon or salt pork.

Clam Chowder
A recipe for delicious clam chowder that uses salt pork to enhance the flavor.

Uses for Salt Pork
Salt pork has a lot of uses when cooking food stuffs that are plain or bland on their own.

String Beans with Salt Pork
Those who like the flavor of salt pork will find string beans cooked with a small piece of this meat very appetizing.

Boiled Cabbage with Salt Pork
Boiled cabbage has a more appetizing flavor if bacon or ham fat is used for seasoning or if a small quantity of ham or salt pork is cooked with it.

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