How it works
Dry-cured meats lose water as they hang, and recipes say when they're ready as a share of the starting weight lost. A piece that goes in at 1,000 g with a 30% target is ready at 700 g. Enter the starting weight and your recipe's target, then add a weigh-in every few days. Each one shows how much it has lost and how far is left to go.
The figures here are arithmetic, not recommendations. The right target depends on the product, its size and the recipe, so use the one your recipe gives.
Weighing well
- Take the starting weight at the point your recipe measures from. Many measure from when the meat goes in to dry, after curing and casing or netting; some from the raw weight before curing. Check yours.
- Use the same scale each time, and weigh at about the same time of day.
- Weigh it with the same string or netting each time, so the change is the meat's.
What weight loss tells you, and what it doesn't
Weight loss is a practical way to follow drying. Industry guidelines note that it can be related to water activity, the measure of how much water in the meat is available to bacteria. But it's an average for the whole piece:
- Thick pieces dry more slowly. Different diameters need different lengths of time to reach the same dryness.
- Drying too fast traps moisture inside. If the humidity drops too quickly, the surface dries hard (case hardening) and stops the inside drying, so a piece can hit its target weight with a wet centre.
So reaching the target is a sign it may be ready, not proof it's safe. Safety comes from the whole process: the right cure, temperature and humidity throughout, and for fermented sausage such as salami, the acidity reached during fermentation. Follow a tested recipe, and treat this tracker as a record of your batch.
Where your batches are kept
Batches are saved in this browser, on this device only. Nothing is sent to us. Clearing the site's data removes them, and they won't appear on your other devices.
Sources: Australian Meat Industry Council (AMIC), Guidelines for the Safe Manufacture of Smallgoods, 3rd edition (2025). All sources and how we use them.
Informational only — not professional advice.