Guainciale
Created by @CaptainBucko • October 27, 2025
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Times
- Eq: 15 days
- Drying: 20 days
- Aging: 20 days
This recipe is for Guanciale. This is Italian cured pork cheek, a fundamental ingredient to Pasta Carbonara. Most commercial Guanciale (if you can find it), is too salty. This recipe is light on salt, and allows the wonderful pork flavor to lead.
Spices, salt(s) and sugars are scaled to match the weight of your cheek. Each cheek varies, depending on how you cut it from the head, and how big the animal was. In this recipe, it is assumed the meat weight is 1kg. Scale the spices up or down as per your size of cheel.
Meat 1000(g) (example, yours will vary)
ie: 1.85% of 1kg pork cheek = 18.5grams.
Ingredients
- 1 kg Pork Cheek - Trimmed, Remove Glands
- 18.50 g Maldon Salt - or Sea Salt
- 1.30 g Pink Salt #2
- 18 g Brown Sugar
- 2 g Chilli Powder
- 2 g Black Peppercorn, Ground
- 1 g Fennel Seeds, Crushed
- 1 g Bay Leafs, Whole
- 1 g Juniper Berries, Crushed
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Instructions
- Trim pork cheek to square up edges. Remove glands. Weigh meat. Calculate weight of ingredients as percentage of meat weight. Combine all spices, herbs, sugar and salts. Rub into meat covering the surface entirely in a container. Make sure you rub into all the gaps and cracks to ensure a complete cure.
- Place meat into a plastic zip lock bag. Add all left over rub to the bag. Remove air and seal.
- Place into refrigerator for 15 days. Flip bag over every few days. There will be moisture build up in the bag - this moisture dissolves the salts and sugars. This is normal. Turning the bag over every few coats the meat and helps enable the curing process. You will feel the meat firm up during this time.
- After 15 days, remove the meat from the bag and rinse with white wine, white vermouth, or water, ensuring to remove all excess spices from the surface of the meat. Lightly pat dry.
- Weigh your guanciale and record the weight. You will need to know this later to calculate moisture loss.
- Lay your guanciale on a cake rack and place this rack on top of a glass baking dish full of just damp sea salt, in your beer fridge or any other fridge. Place it on the lowest shelf. The damp sea salt helps to increase humidity near the guanciale in the drying phase. The outside will dry more than the inside, but that is ok as we will fix this in the aging phase.
- Every couple of days, weigh the guanciale and calculate the moisture loss. When the moisture loss reach 15% of the original weight, the guanciale is ready for aging. You can also smoke the guanciale at this stage if you want Guanciale Fume.
- Place the guanciale into a vacuum sealed bag, and seal. Place this bag into the crisper draw of your fridge. Leave it in the fridge for 20 days. This allows moisture to evenly distributed throughout the muscle.
- After aging it is now ready to use. You can remove the skin, and cube the guanciale for carbonara. You can leave the skin on, and thinly slice the guanciale for pork cheek bacon.
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