🥓 Salo

Salo (also salted fatback, Ukrainian cured lard) is salted pig subcutaneous fat from the back and sides, with or without skin, eaten in thin slices. Ukrainian academic literature calls it «шпик». For salted salo the textbook takes fat from the back and side parts of the carcass at least 2.5 cm thick.

Did you know that salo melts at just 30–40 °C? Its make-up is well measured: according to the Bulletin of the Poltava State Agrarian Academy (2013), subcutaneous fat is 92–94 % fat, 4–4.5 % water and 1.3–1.5 % non-melting residue. The heavier the pig, the more fat and the less water: back fat from pigs of three breeds held 90.96–93.19 % fat and 5.79–7.37 % water.

Industrial salting, as the textbook by Mankovskyi and Antoniuk (2014) describes it, goes like this. The fat is dipped in brine, rubbed with salt and packed in parchment-lined boxes on a 1–1.5 cm layer of salt, salted layer by layer and pressed under a weight. There it stays 14–16 days at +2 to +4 °C. Salt use is 13 % of the raw weight, 5 % of it for rubbing. Garlic, pepper and other spices go in for taste. The principle is explained in Curing of meat. Smoking is optional.

Finished salo is firm, white or pink on the cut, with 3–4 % salt; strips of meat make up no more than 5 % of the fat mass. Salt does not make it sterile: it only lowers water activity and hardly kills bacteria (FAO).

So where does it come from? No source names a date or place of origin for salo; all that can be said is that it is a traditional product of Ukrainian cuisine. It has no PDO, PGI or TSG name.

Do not mistake it for bacon or pancetta, which are belly with layers of meat; salo is back and side fat with skin, eaten mostly as fat, so the nearest British or American relatives are fatback and salt pork rather than rashers. Set against Jamón, Prosciutto crudo and Dry-cured hams and shoulders, it is not muscle meat. A similar firm pork back fat, though, goes into Dry-cured sausages and Salami.

At a butcher's counter, a market stall or a supermarket meat aisle, look for firm salo, white or pinkish on the cut, with thin layers of meat. It carries no EU PDO, PGI or TSG mark, and the sources found no single state standard for salo, so go by the ingredients: pork fat and salt.

Why does this matter to you? Salo is very energy-dense: according to USDA, raw pork back fat has 812 kcal per 100 g, and salt pork 748 kcal and 2684 mg sodium. Portions stay small.