Salt pork substitutes

Also salt-cured pork belly, also unsmoked, also sold in a slab you can cut into lardons. This is the same idea from a different country.

Best for

Boston baked beans, clam chowder, collard greens, peas and rice, braises

Pancetta is cured with black pepper, bay and sometimes juniper, so the pot picks up a faint spiced note salt pork does not have, and it is less aggressively salty, which is why you add salt back. It also has more lean meat and less pure fat, so you get somewhat less rendered fat in the pan. In a chowder this reads as a slightly more perfumed, slightly less porky broth.

The swap almost everyone actually reaches for, and it works. Bacon is cured pork belly too, just sliced thin and usually smoked.

Best for

baked beans, chowder, greens, cornbread, hash, stews

Smoke is the whole difference and it is not subtle. A pot of baked beans made with smoked bacon tastes like barbecue rather than like old-fashioned New England beans, and a Jamaican stew peas made with it fights the coconut milk. Unsmoked or green bacon avoids the problem entirely. If all you have is smoked, use two thirds the weight so the smoke sits behind the other flavours, and rinse the slices under cold water first to knock back the cure.

The traditional Caribbean answer, and often the better one. These bring salt and fat like salt pork does, plus gelatin from the bone and skin that gives the pot a silky body salt pork cannot.

Best for

peas and rice, stew peas, callaloo, split pea soup, collard greens, pelau

Salted pigtail and salt beef are usually much saltier than salt pork, so cover them with cold water, bring to a boil, drain, and repeat once before they go in the pot, or the finished dish will be inedible. They also want a long slow cook of an hour or more to give up their collagen, so add them at the start rather than partway through. The trade is a richer, stickier, more gelatinous pot with a slightly gamier flavour.

If your shop has fresh belly but no cured pork, this is the closest thing you can put together yourself for a dish you are cooking today.

Best for

baked beans, greens, braises, chowder, rice dishes

You get the right fat, the right amount of salt and the right texture, but not the cured tang, so the pot tastes cleaner and more like plain roast pork than like salt pork. Brown it well before the liquid goes in to build some of that missing depth. To be completely clear, this is seasoning meat for immediate cooking, not curing it. Do not treat it as a cure, do not hold it for days, and never use it in a recipe that relies on a cure for safety.

Both are cut from the same part of the animal in the same spirit. Lardons are cubed fatty bacon or belly; guanciale is cured pork jowl and is the fattiest and most intensely flavoured of the group.

Best for

chowder, baked beans, braised greens, rice and peas, soffritto bases

Guanciale renders more fat than salt pork and its flavour is deeper and slightly funkier, so the pot ends up richer and a touch more assertive. It is also expensive, which makes it a poor choice for a dish where the pork is only there for background salt. Lardons behave almost exactly like salt pork but are usually smoked, so read the label.

The honest pork-free version. It cannot replace pork, but it can replace the three things pork was doing: fat, salt and savoury depth.

Best for

vegetarian rice and peas, meatless collard greens, vegan baked beans, split pea soup

What you lose is the chew, the little browned nuggets of meat, and the slow-building richness that only rendered pork fat gives a long-cooked pot, so the dish tastes seasoned rather than deep. A teaspoon of miso or a dried mushroom dropped into the liquid closes more of the gap than any amount of extra paprika. For Caribbean pots, coconut oil rather than a neutral oil is the better choice because it belongs in the flavour profile already.