Is our bacon nitrate free? The honest, long-form answer — my three-year journey with cures, what I got wrong, what the science actually says, and why our bacon and ham are made the way they are.
We get asked about this most weeks, so here's the honest, long-form answer — my three-year journey with cures, what I got wrong, what the science actually says, and why our bacon and ham are made the way they are.
"Is your bacon nitrate free?"
It's a fair question, and I get it a few times a week. For a farm like ours — no herbicides, no drenches, pasture-raised pigs, the whole crunchy package — people naturally assume the smallgoods must be "nitrate free" too. When I tell them we cure with a modern pickle, it sometimes shocks folks. So let me walk you through how I actually got here, because it wasn't a shortcut. It was the opposite.
I don't come from a butcher background. Everything we do at Wolki Butchery I've had to work out through my team, a lot of research, and a fair bit of stubborn curiosity. When it came to bacon, my whole customer base wanted "nitrate free," so that's exactly what I set out to make. For about three years I chased it.
I tried a proper dry cure — burying pork belly in a 50/50 mix of salt and raw sugar for a week. The best product I made in that whole period was a dry-cured streaky done this way. It was delicious. But there was a catch: huge weight loss on the meat, and a lot of salt and sugar you just throw away at the end, and an extreme amount of time and labour.
In the end, the bacon was still "brown" and not "pink" like what people expected, so lots on conversations and ongoing education. I don't have an issue with these trade offs necessarily, but there are only so many battles we can fight at a time. It become too much.
Then I tried the "natural" route everyone points you to — celery powder. This is the stuff that lets producers put "no added nitrites" or "no synthetic nitrites" on the label. I found it genuinely challenging to get a product out of celery powder that customers actually liked. It came out tasting more like roast pork than bacon, and the results were inconsistent batch to batch.
Here's the part that changed how I think about the whole thing.
Years back I rang a fellow regen farmer who proudly advertised "nitrate free" bacon, and I asked him how he pulled it off. His answer?
"Easy — we just use nitrites instead." 🙄
That was the beginning of the penny dropping. "Natural nitrites" and "organic nitrites" from celery powder aren't a loophole around nitrites — they are nitrites. Celery juice powder is loaded with naturally occurring nitrates (roughly 1,500–3,000 ppm) that convert to nitrite during curing, exactly the same active molecule that's doing the work in a conventional cure. As one food scientist at McGill University put it, it's "very misleading to label these products as nitrite free."
I spent an afternoon last year really digging into this — and I'll be honest, I learned more in a few hours of properly researching it than in six years of casual reading and chatting to industry people. The line that stuck with me most was this:
"The molecule does not retain moral memory of its source."
Nitrite is nitrite. It doesn't matter whether it came from a jar labelled "curing salt" or from a scoop of celery powder wearing a health-halo. In fact, celery powder can be more volatile and irregular than a measured pickle — which means you can end up delivering a higher, less predictable dose while telling customers it's the "clean" option. That didn't sit right with me.
Once I understood that, I went looking for the bigger picture — how much of this stuff are we actually eating, and from where? The numbers genuinely surprised me:
So the idea that cured meat is this uniquely scary source of nitrates doesn't really hold up. If you're eating a salad, you're getting a bigger nitrate hit than you are from a rasher of our bacon.
Here's something the "nitrate free" marketing conveniently skips. That curing salt isn't just there for colour and flavour — it's a food-safety tool. Sodium nitrite is one of the main things that holds back Clostridium botulinum, the bug behind botulism, in cured meats. The USDA has required its use in products like bacon since 1925 for exactly this reason. It's part of why properly cured smallgoods store well and stay safe.
Interestingly, this is one of the reasons regulators still make celery-powder producers label their product "uncured" — because celery powder's ability to control botulism hasn't been reliably established the way conventional curing has. So the "natural" version can actually be the less-proven one on the safety front.
You'll have seen the headlines. My honest take: the premise that bacon clogs your arteries is the issue, not the bacon. Context matters enormously. There's a world of difference between a cheap, feed-lot, machine-made supermarket sausage packed with fillers and preservatives, and a rasher of bacon from a pasture-raised pig that lived a good life, eaten as part of a real-food diet.
Where legitimate concern exists, it's largely about nitrosamines — compounds that can form when cured meat is cooked at very high heat. That's a known thing, and the industry addresses it: curing formulations include ascorbate (vitamin C) specifically to suppress nitrosamine formation. So it's not that there's nothing to it — it's that the reality is far more nuanced than "bacon = bad."
After all that experimenting, a few years ago we made the call to stop messing around with "organic" and "natural" nitrites and go with a modern industry pickle to cure our smallgoods. I know that surprises people who assume we'd go the other way.
The reasons were simple and honest: it stores better, tastes better, has better consistency, and a better colour. I'm not claiming natural methods can't be done, or that they're dangerous — I'm saying that after three years of genuine effort, I wasn't convinced they were the best way to achieve what we're trying to achieve for you.
And in true Wolki style, we've never hidden it. It's been in our social posts, our conversations, our emails, and it's right there in the ingredient list on every product page. Our bacon contains sugar, salt and a curing salt (you'll see it listed as additive 250 on the pack). No smoke, no mirrors, no health-halo labelling games. If you want the "clean-label" story, plenty of brands will happily sell it to you. We'd rather tell you exactly what's in your food and let you make the call.
That's the whole point of this post really. We're not trying to convince you nitrites are magic. We're trying to give you the full picture — the same one I had to piece together myself — so you can decide with your eyes open. I'm always happy to be proven wrong, and I'm still learning. If we crack a natural method we're genuinely proud of, you'll be the first to know.
Our bacon and ham come from heritage-breed pigs raised outdoors on our regenerative farm — no hormones, no antibiotics, foraging the way pigs are meant to. Cured with care, smoked in our own smoker, and packed with a full, honest ingredient list.
Got a question about how we make our smallgoods? Reply to any of our emails or reach out at eat@wolkifarm.com.au — I'm always keen to talk shop.
— Jake
