The Joy of Smoking and Salt Curing: The Complete Guide to Smoking and Curing Meat, Fish, Game, and More (Joy of Series) Kindle Edition

very knowledgeable, but was looking for a guide with options for NO nitrates/nitrites - that's not this one

This introduction to smoking and curing is full of photos and some great basic information for the beginner. If you are interested in making your own bacon (super easy) or smoking a turkey (very tasty) this is a good place for you to get started.It is not an in-depth study of smoking and curing, to be sure. Other books go deeper into the chemistry, processes, and different smoking/curing approaches. But they are aimed at serious hobbyists or people considering smoked/cured meats as a business venture. For the guy or gal that wants to step up the flavor of food they make, not food they buy, this is a great little intro to the equipment and procedures used by most home smokers.I have both the hard copy and the kindle versions. Either works quite nicely and with Amazon's cloud reader, the less expensive Kindle version can work quite well if you don't mind reading it on your computer. I'll be using some of the recipes mentioned in the book.It is not the one and only book you will want on the subject, but it is a fine starter.

Bought this book as a survival guide and to have if we ever lose electricity.

If you're interested in discovering more about taking control of your food and making it at home, you want this book. With the cost of proteins going up and the quality more often questionable than good, it makes great sense to buy good stuff in bulk, and butcher, cure, and preserve your own at home. It's not only pretty easy, it's a blast, and the tastes you'll build are night and day from store bought.

This is a great book, it covers all of the important aspects of curing and smoking that you need to know for home use without a lot of boring technical details that would only be important for commercial use, It's written in plain simple to understand English and is very easy to follow, it also has a lot of recipe's and pictures.

This book is a great guide for anyone with a smoker. We have found some incredible recipes in here!

A handy book to have for people living in the country or for fisher people to smoke or cure their catch, please remember that the meat still needs to be cooked after you have salted or smoked it. And the small is a nice way to tease the neighbours. A great book and I highly recommend you get it while it's still in print.

Its not what I was hoping for. Not an "encyclopedia" of curing and smoking like another review said. Far from exhaustive and not much help to anyone with a basic knowledge of the processes. Useful for the most basic of beginners perhaps, but not what I was hoping for.

I made a reckless declaration that I was going to smoke a couple of ducks for our Xmas lunch - and when afterwards thinking this through, sought reassurance with this inexpensive Kindle download, to make sure there wouldn't be an outbreak of food poisoning, what with it being the holiday and A&E units probably could do without more grief. I understand what other reviewers have said about the American bias of the book, but once I got past that I can't fault it for its basic principles, though admittedly the assumption that you need to smoke (a) meat that you've personally killed, and (b) enough to feed the population of a small city - also needs factoring in. So in conclusion, if you're serious about this and need a bit of hand holding, there are better, more UK centric books you need to be reading. If, like me, you're basically slow cooking joints, poultry, steaks etc, in a smoke-filled kettle barbecue, then this book gives you a reasonable basis for working out times and temperatures for the perfect result.

Something that has interested me for some time. Still trying to get to grips with what it says to do but would say that it is a book I would recommend.

Has more to do with mentioning product to do it with than how to do it. Also very USA based.

This book is primarily aimed at the American market. Many of the ingredients and grills etc are sadly unavailable in UK however there are plenty of tips ,ideas and recipes to get started with.

Enjoyed very much, very good overview of the processes for the home user. I never knew curing was so simple or I would have done it decades ago, my side bacon and back bacon turned out superbly the first time, I have never tasted bacon this good in my life. Everyone I shared it with said the same. I used all of the mentioned premixed cures and played with them adding maple sugar or maple syrup or both and Bradley's additional seasoning recipe added to the cure, and they all came out great so that choosing which recipe to keep as my go to was very very difficult but they all where hands down better than store bought. I did find that he copied and pasted a lot of the recipes and information from the manufactures sites, however it does put it all in one place and you don't have to google all over the place to find the information. I would recommend getting the book Charcuterie as an accompaniment the two go hand in hand with the latter having even more information in easy laymen terms and more recipes and different techniques laid out for the home kitchen.