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Y'all are taking the ppm from the measurement of curing salt to water. However, one thing you're forgetting. Curing salt is 93.75% plain salt; only 6.25% is nitrite. You must refigure your ppm by the amount of nitrite only, not curing salt total. This brings all calculations into alignment. Once your curing brine concentration is sufficient to do the job, then it will always be the same concentration. To round it off, instead of 3.84 oz. of curing salt, let's just use 4 ounces of curing salt to 1 gallon of brine is maximum cure. Now, if I use ¼ of that amount, then the brine will always be that concentration amount. Nothing will change that concentration. So that is how I know for a certainty that my curing brine does not, and will not, exceed safe levels of concentration. The only way to do that is to increase the amount added or to reduce the amount of water it is being added to.
Secondly, the obsession with the "10% pump" is irrelevant. When you add curing brine to meat, the absorption is going to happen. A "10% pump" is a calculated figure that pork will hold approx. 10% more weight by pumping in the brine so it's curing from the inside-out as well as the outside-in so it won't spoil, but the concentration of nitrite to water doesn't change. The concentration is, and will always be, the same. The 10% pump is for what weight is added, not the brine concentration. In other words, if you add 10% weight to the product during curing, you need to remove 10% weight during cooking or the product will be deemed "water-added". That is all it is. Different cooking methods will extract water from the processing in different amounts. That is why there is 10%, 20%, even 30% water-added cooked ham products for deli slicing use. (30% you can almost wring out the slices of cooked ham before putting it in your sandwich, lol!). You are not increasing or decreasing the ppm concentration of the curing brine, that remains constant.
