I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [83]
Brines supercharge meats with flavor and moisture, and also can be used as a pickling agent for fruits and vegetables. Sauerkraut, for example, begins as little more than shredded cabbage and a weak brine that acts as a microbial bouncer, allowing the bacteria necessary for fermentation in, while keeping those that would spoil the party out.
FLAVORING AGENTS
Want to get more flavor into a piece of food before or during cooking? Choose your weapon:
• Powder: Can be as simple as a sprinkling of salt and pepper or as complex as a dredging in a spice rub (See The Rub).
• Breading or crust: Could be a standard breading (flour, egg, bread crumbs), a coating of crushed potato chips, or a crust of toasted nuts. The flavor comes not only from the added food but from the caramelization that results from its cooking. Crusts and breadings can also protect foods from overcooking. (Read the section on breadings in Frying.)
• Baste: Any time you apply a flavorful liquid to a piece of food during cooking, you’re basting, and like the Force, basting can be used for good or evil. Grilling chicken thighs over an open fire: basting is good. Broiling your pork ribs after a long braise: basting is good. Roasting a turkey: basting is bad—very bad. My rule is that if you’re trying to cook a piece of food (especially meat) and you must open a door or lift a lid to get to it, you shouldn’t. The No-Backyard Baby-Back Ribs ribs are an exception because they’re already done. The broiling process is all about caramelizing the baste.
Had Shakespeare chosen to reach for a culinary metaphor in his love sonnets, brining would have been the one. Brining is a wonderful thing because it’s invisible. You brine a piece of meat, cook it, cut it, serve it, and everybody tastes it and exclaims in disbelief, “Man, this is great meat. You’re a genius!” Learn to brine pork and poultry and soon you’ll be clearing room on your mantel for that Nobel Prize in cooking. How can a simple concoction of salt and water make such a difference? Like most things, it’s a matter of chemistry.
Meat is made up of cells. Cells are surrounded by membranes, which function like borders between countries: they are discriminating. Any substance that wants in or out of the cell must present its papers and pass a rigid inspection. The substance that moves across this border most often and most freely is water.
The micromilieu of meat is all about balance. Inside the cell there are dissolved solids—salts, potassium, calcium, and the like—and outside there’s . . . well, it depends. Drop a pork chop in a bucket of distilled water and there’s nothing but H2O outside the border. In this case, the border officials are unhappy because there’s a lot more salt inside the cell than outside, thus no balance. So the border temporarily opens, and the guards allow some water to move into the meat and some salt to move out into the water. Eventually the meat will lose a good bit of its native flavor to the water.
However, if there’s salt in the water (even as little as a few hundred parts per million), the border guards—ever desirous of equilibrium—will throw open the borders and allow both salt and water to move across the membranes. Now this is where things get really interesting: after 8 to 24 hours there’s more salt in the meat, and more water has to be retained to balance it—that’s just the osmotic way. So now you’ve got cells that are perfectly seasoned with salt and nicely plump with water, which if you think about it is something of a paradox: salt pulls liquid out of meats, yet the right brine can pump water into meat.
But wait, there’s more.
SALAD DRESSING’S SECRET
When you whisk up a vinaigrette, make extra to use as a marinade. I like to use dressings containing either soy or Worcestershire sauce as marinades because their high sodium content acts like a brine.
Extra-virgin