The present work is an analytical study concerning the level of residual nitrites and nitrates in various salted meat products manufactured in Romania. The complexity of the food matrix, the extracting conditions of the food additives, the reduction method of nitrates to nitrites, and the quantification method of free and total nitrites became the main factors that conditioned the obtained values for these parameters, important for defining the chemical hazard of the up mentioned products. The alkaline method gave a better extraction of nitrites and nitrates comparatively to the reference method; the manual reduction applied to a single sample assured a better conversion yield than the method involving column reduction on a cadmium-zinc sponge; the photometric method with nitrite-test for residual nitrites and nitrates quantification gave slightly lower values than the Greiss reference standard method.