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curing

Food preservation with salt

Also known as food curing · curing food · curing (food preservation)

Instance of: food processing
Subclass of: food preservation

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Curing is any of various food preservation and flavoring processes of foods such as meat, fish and vegetables, by the addition of salt, with the aim of drawing moisture out of the food by the process of osmosis. Because curing increases the solute concentration in the food and hence decreases its water potential, the food becomes inhospitable for the microbe growth that causes food spoilage. Curing can be traced back to antiquity, and was the primary method of preserving meat and fish until the late 19th century. Dehydration was the earliest form of food curing. Many curing processes also involve smoking, spicing, cooking, or the addition of combinations of sugar, nitrate, and nitrite.

Overview

All data

18 statements · 6% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Different from: curing
salting
food drying
Uses: table salt

On other databases

10 identifiers linking curing across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

externally sourced

Source last edited August 15, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). curing (Q1503716). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/curing-Q1503716