Chapter 3: Brine Curing
Brine curing is an industrial development of hand salting. Hides are dipped in a saturated salt/water solution. The hides and the water should be kept in motion with paddles in order to obtain good penetration of the salt in the fibers of the hides. This method is dubbed the raceway curing. The salt vat is an oval with an oval island in its center. Two rotating paddles keep the brine solution and the hides in motion.
With this method you can cure hides within a period of about 24 hours. After the 24 hour curing the hides should taken out of the raceway and hung for draining. Proper draining is done in 15 days, but can be accelerated by pulling the hides through a wringer.
Brine cured hides don’t look too good. They are usually dirty, but when you scrape off the dirt you generally find under the dirt a beautifully white cured hide. This method is of course for a more industrial approach and should be considered for operations that have a daily production of some 200/+ hide
Chapter 4: Dry salting
A combination of wet salting and drying is dry salting. Hides that are wet salted can be dried afterwards and be turned into a dry salted hide. Dry salted hides have a better quality than air dried hides, whereas wet salted hides are of better quality than dry salted hides. Dry salted hides are found in countries with a hot climate where wet salted hides would not maintain their natural moisture. What happens in hot climates is that wetsalted hides slowly dry out at the edges when undergoing curing or while awaiting shipment. The inner part of a hide would contain a high percentage of moisture whereas the outer edges would be bone dry. Due to the temperature of the environment it is likely that the humid core of a pallet of wetsalted hides will slowly deteriorate. Once a hide is dry contact with humidity should be avoided, unless for rehydration for processing, as it will re-start bacterial growths and putrefy, whereas if the hide is completely dried, there will be no bacterial growth.
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