What it does
Brining, fermenting and curing all come down to weighing salt as a percentage of something. The trouble is that recipes mean different things by “a 5 % brine”, and curing salt needs care. This page does the arithmetic in five small calculators:
- Make a brine: grams of salt for a given weight of water and strength. ”% of salt + water” is the strength of the finished brine (salt ÷ whole brine); ”% of the water only” is salt ÷ water, which many recipes use and which gives a slightly weaker brine.
- Check a brine: the strength of a brine you made, both ways, and in salinometer degrees (°SAL), where 100° is saturated brine (about 26.4 % salt by weight at 15.6 °C). You can also turn a salinometer reading into a percentage.
- Vegetable ferment (equilibrium brine): salt as a percentage of the vegetables plus any water, because the salt evens out across both.
- Dry cure: salt and sugar as percentages of the meat’s weight.
- Curing salt (nitrite): grams of cure for a nitrite target you enter, from the sodium nitrite percentage on your cure’s label, or the level a planned amount of cure gives.
How to use it
Weigh everything in grams; 1 ml of water is about 1 g. Fill in the boxes of the calculator you need; results update as you type. Download all results as CSV, or as an image, PDF or Word file.
Worked example
Press Use the example (made-up amounts that show the arithmetic, not recommendations).
- 1000 g of water at 5 % of the brine needs 52.6 g salt: 52.6 ÷ (52.6 + 1000) = 5 %. That brine is 5.26 % of the water and 18.9 °SAL. At “5 % of the water only” it would be 50 g.
- 60 g of salt in 940 g of water is 6.00 % of the brine, 6.38 % of the water and 22.7 °SAL.
- 1000 g of vegetables and 500 g of water at 2 % need 30.0 g salt, which is 1.96 % of everything once the salt is in.
- 2000 g of meat at 2.5 % salt and 1 % sugar needs 50.0 g salt and 20.0 g sugar.
For the curing salt, only the maths is shown: with numbers chosen just to show the sums, 2000 g of meat, a cure labelled 10 % nitrite and a target of 100 ppm, the page gives 2.00 g cure (200 mg sodium nitrite). 3 g of that cure would give 150 ppm.
Safety
Sodium nitrite is poisonous in excess, and too little can let dangerous bacteria grow. This page never suggests an amount. Take the target from a tested recipe and the rules where you live, check the official source, and weigh cure on a scale that reads to 0.1 g or better.
FAQ
Why are there two ways to give a brine %? Both are used. The page shows each so you can match your recipe.
What about a wet cure or injection? Then the nitrite in the meat depends on how much brine it takes up, which this page does not model.
Is anything uploaded? No. Everything runs in your browser and works offline.
Where the numbers come from
- Arithmetic by weight (general facts): brine % = salt ÷ (salt + water); salt per water = salt ÷ water; ppm = mg per kg. The salinometer scale (0° for water, 100° for saturated brine, about 26.4 % sodium chloride by weight at 15.6 °C / 60 °F) is a general convention.
- Checked by hand and with an independent Python calculation (salt for 5 % brine both ways, strength of 60 g in 940 g, salinometer degrees, equilibrium salt, dry cure, cure grams for a ppm and back).
- No salt or nitrite levels are recommended. The example amounts are made up to show the arithmetic; the nitrite target and the cure's nitrite % are always entered by the user.
Standard scientific values, such as constants, atomic weights and melting points, are facts found in every textbook; we name where ours were checked. If you are an author or publisher and want a value, a credit or a table changed or removed, tell us and we will act quickly.
Last updated 2026-11-09.