What’s cooking this week: Can nitrate-free charcuteries cut cancer risk?

Sitting down to a meal of bread, cheese and charcuterie — with a glass of cold and crisp white wine — is probably one of my favourite ways of eating.

When it is with bread I made myself, it comes with a lot of smugness about the slow fermented French baguette, ciabatta and potato bread made in a bread making class I attended last Sunday offered by Megan Meikle of Voila Bakery at HTA School of Culinary Art in Randburg.

What’s good enough to top homemade bread? I settled for a selection of cured meats available from the new range of charcuterie made by Farmer Angus in partnership with Checkers.

It’s a first for a retailer to offer a range of salami sticks and slices, pancetta, prosciutto, black forest and coppa ham that contain no nitrates, nitrites or gluten. The theory behind the meats is great — produced from pigs raised in environmentally kind pastures on the Spier wine farm in Stellenbosch and packaging in eye-catching recyclable designer sheaths of cardboard with a window in the shape of a pig to display the contents. I was tempted too by the price, starting at R64.99 for 100g.

Nitrates and nitrites are compounds that occur naturally in the body. A natural healthy source is found in green leafy vegetables, especially celery. Manufacturers add it as a preservative to cured and processed meats - think cold meats, sausages/viennas and bacon - as it improves the colour and gives the meat an appetising pink/red colouring.

The nitrate-free meats offer the same tempting good colour, except in the salami sticks, which were quite pale, but in terms of flavour I found them to be bland, perhaps because of the conditioning of my tastebuds.

Apart from the preservative qualities and the colour, I’ve discovered it is a fact that the use of nitrates in curing meats does add to the characteristic salty taste one comes to expect in cured foods.

So will it be taste versus health as it is said the high intake of foods containing added nitrates may have the potential to increase the risk of cancer.