Eben van tonder

Woodys Consumer Brands (Pty) Ltd · Factory operations

The most up to date history of bacon ever produced. The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, cloth...

Over the last number of years we re-designed the traditional system of producing bacon. We challenged the status quo, believing in thinking differently and redesigned the system so that the results are vastly superior to traditional systems. We aimed for and achieved, * superior production yields; * vastly improved slicing yields of between 90% a...

After years of research and extensive experimentation, we present the best bacon system on earth!

Microbial Transglutaminase (MTG) is one of the most important developments in the meat industry, comparable with the direct application of sodium nitrite to curing brines early in the 1900’s. The meat industry has a long history of restructuring or reshaping large muscles by using various forms of technology such as casings, netting and ham moulds...

Overview Many years ago people used saltpeter to cure meat. It was discovered that saltpeter or potassium nitrate do not directly contribute to meat curing. Denitrifying bacteria remove one oxygen atom from the nitrogen compound, nitrate, and nitrite is created. Nitrite turns into nitric oxide and it is this molecule that is responsible for curing....

The article explores the background to the enigmatic name, Prague Salt. The historical context in Germany, Prague and in the USA are considered between the middle of the 1800 to the 1920's, related to sodium nitrite.

Pork is turned into bacon by the reaction of nitrite. The story of nitrite and its use as curing agent is intriguing and an important part played off in Prague. The story has never before been told in the West or in English. This article is the first in a series of articles to follow on the life and achievements of Ladislav NACHMÜLLNER. Here we int...

Few companies had the impact on an industry as C&T Harris had on the bacon industry. We focus on a number of points in this article. The importance and role of good quality pork supply from local and foreign sources. The Harris brothers as good butchers. I offer a possible explanation for the exact nature of the first sweet cure they developed and...

One of the most exciting stories in bacon is that of saltpeter (potassium nitrate) and sodium nitrite. We deel with the question of their efficacy as antimicrobials or are these chemicals merely functional to provide the colour and taste to cured products such as bacon.

Removing nitrite from bacon production is to remove an important hurdle against clostridium botulinum. We examine the bacteria, its toxicity and prevalence and start looking at a suggested system of alternative barriers to the use of nitrite.

This article outlines the development of curing technology against the backdrop of the advances in science that gave rise to the coal tar dye industry after an accidental discovery of synthetic mauve (a pale purple coulor, named after the mallow flower) by the young English scientist, William Perkin. It outlines the explosion of chemical synthesis...

Before nitrite was directly added to curing brines, seeding the new brine with old, used brine was a way of adding nitrite directly to the curing brine, thus speeding up the curing process. The old, used brine that contained the nitrite was called the mother brine. The process was probably "industrialized" by the Danes and later adapted in England...

This article tracks the migration of the meat industry from the use of saltpeter (potassium or sodium nitrate) as curing agent to sodium nitrite. It gives an overview of the scientific discoveries which started to reveal the mechanisms of meat curing. This understanding lead to the realisation that a direct application of nitrite as the curing agen...