 Hello, I'm Lindy Walsmith and I'm the author of Cured. Today I'm going to show you how to cure belly of pork. I'm going to start with good old British streaky bacon and then we're going on to do a classic French cure, the pitticellae. In order to cure bacon you need very very few ingredients. Literally sea salt, curing salt, of demorayra sugar and mix the dough up. So rub your cure into the piece of meat. One thing I learnt very early on, what stays on stays on and what falls off, falls off. Literally you just take your cure and you rub it in. The warmth of the hands will obviously help the cure penetrate through the meat. One important thing to remember before putting the bacon to cure after you've sorted it is to stab it, especially in the thicker parts of the meat. This is to help the salt through the meat. That's really important with a loin where you get very very thick pieces of meat. Right and that's basically it. You then need to put it into some kind of container. You can use anything but nothing metallic and it's a good idea to actually pop it up on something so that when the water starts to leaching out of the bacon it's not actually sitting in water. Don't cover it, you need the air to access the meat in order for the cure to take well and that you can sit in a domestic fridge for a week. You can see already that the meat is starting to darken up because obviously the liquid coming out of it intensifies the texture of the meat and you can see it's already much thinner than it was. The next stage of course is to hang it up which is of course the really important part of making your own bacon. This is what really imparts the flavour to the meat. I'm going to slide this now into a piece of muslin, not at the bottom, not at again at the top and you pop the hook into the top knot and hang it for at least three weeks. Okay I'm going to show you how to make a classic dry salted belly of pork, la piti sale. I got here a kilo of middle white pork. For this I've actually boned it out. When you're buying your belly have a good look but it's plenty of lean meat within the fat. So I'm going to use 200 grams of this aromatics salt and to that I'm going to add a few more spices, four cloves and a teaspoon of juliper berries and to that I'm going to add the bay leaves and it's very important to start mashing the bay leaves because that immediately releases the oils and the lovely flavours and aromas. They want you to mix your spices, make a very thin layer of the salt and on top I'm going to lay my belly and then add the rest of the salt basically burying the whole piece in the salt. A board and a weight on the top of the bear and then you just leave it and wait. You can use it after three or four days or you can leave it like that for two months at least. If you have a look at the piti sale after it's been curing for four days it's very much harder and it's really flat and thin and all we're going to do to that is to rinse it off. So it's a very simple way of curing a piece of pork and making it very delicious at home. I rinsed off the cure and now I'm going to put it in some fresh water and add to it cured sausage, a bouquet garni, bay leaves and peppercorns. Top that up a little bit with water. Bring it up to the boil and then turn it down to a gentle simmer and leave it to cook for 40 minutes with a lid on cracked. Now I'm going to serve piti sale. And then you have a very inexpensive warming winter meal.