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Blonder busts the myth that osmosis is how the salt enters meat Almost all the cookbooks tell us that salt is pulled out of the brine and into the meat by osmosis, a well known phenomenon we all learned about in high school when we were not napping and passing notes. Osmosis plays a role Dr. Greg Blonder says, but it is of far less importance than another process, diffusion, and in some cases osmosis can even be a hindrance. Another myth busted by Blonder. I asked him to explain the difference between osmosis and diffusion, and here is my version the metaphor he used. Imagine that the other night you had dinner at a nice restaurant where you ordered a wonderful garlic shrimp entree. You couldn't finish it so they put the leftovers in a plastic doggie bag for you. When you got home you put the bag in the fridge. Before bed, when you had your milk and cookies, the fridge smelled fine. But the next morning, as you grab the milk for your cereal, the fridge had a faint scent of garlic shrimp. That night the scent was stronger, and it got stronger by the day. After a while the smell even got into your milk. That's because the scent molecules could get through the semi-permeable bag and the plastic milk bottle. This is sort of what is happening with osmosis, vastly simplified. Molecules in a highly concentrated solution bust through a semi-permeable membrane to get into a less concentrated solution until the two reach equilibrium. Now imagine that for some inexplicable reason you decide to eat the shrimp after a few days. When you open the bag the odors, no longer blocked by the plastic bag, wafts quickly from one end of the room to the other. That is like diffusion, and that is how most of the salt in a brine enters meat (it is really air currents that move odor molecules, but this is a metaphor and not a physics test). That lean pork loin chop you are brining is not wrapped in a plastic bag. No semi-permeable membrane, no osmosis. But there are plenty of juices on the surface. Salt gets into the meat simply by going through wide open pores, sliced muscle fibers, capillaries, and other channels which allow the saline solution to march inward much more quickly and efficiently than by osmosis. Finally, the salt unravels some of the proteins opening up even more channels. Now that doesn't mean there is no osmosis at work at all, says Blonder. "In the early stages of brining, salt ions do leapfrog from cell membrane to cell membrane. Inside the cell they encounter water and other large molecules, and the fluids are alreeady about 0.1% salt. The larger molecules can't leave through the cell wall so as the salt enters the internal pressure rises like a balloon. Eventually, the osmotic pressure gets so high the salt ions are either pushed back out as fast as they enter, or the cell ruptures. In other words, the amount of osmosis in small and osmotic pressure sometimes opposes the diffusive motion of ions from the surface into the meat." Blonder can only speculate why conventional wisdom says that osmotic pressure is the driving force. "Perhaps this is because because the word 'pressure' sounds, well, so forceful compared to random, aimless diffusion." For more technical discussion on the topic, read Blonder's article on his website. For more on osmosis, click the link to visit a college website that explains it in detail with cool animations.

A revelation: Brines don't go far Research by Blonder is fascinating. He took a pork loin about 3" in diameter and submerged it in a concentrated brine, colored it with a dye, and refrigerated it for an hour. As you can see, the brine penetrated only 2 mm, a bit more than 1/16". It didn't pull the larger dye molecules past the surface. And the weight of the meat increased very little. His tests of less concentrated brines produced even less penetration and weight gain. So then he decided to see how penetration would be impacted by time using a milder brine, like the type cooks use. So he took a 12" long section of pork loin and soaked it in a 6% brine for 24 hours in the fridge. Periodically he lopped off a cross section and treated it with an indicator. Here's what how far the salt penetrated: 30 minutes: 3-4 mm (just more than 1/10") 1 hour: 5-6 mm (just under 1/4") 2 hours 7 mm (just over 1/4") 4 hours 10 mm (2/5") 8 hours 13 mm (1/2") 24 hours 17 mm (2/3") That's right, after 24 hours the salt still hadn't traveled 1" deep in the pork. Now that actual penetration can vary on different meats. Chicken is more porous and it will probably penetrate further, and fish more porous still. But you get the picture. When you brine, the salt remains pretty close to the surface, and this is good because it binds water and helps combat overcooking in the zone that overcooks most easily. Another revelation: Brines penetrate during low temp cooking He then took a pork loin and rubbed it with a high concentration of a curing salt, a dry brine, that would react with a chemical he put on coffee filters. It sat for an hour in the fridge. He washed it off and cooked it at 230°F. When the internal temp hit 100°F he cut off a slice, applied the filter paper, and you can see the result in picture (A) below, a nice thin pink kiss. As the internal temp rose, you can see that the salt migrated further and further inward, far faster than it does when simply soaking in brine, forming thicker kisses. In picture E you see a section that had been soaking in a wet brine solution for 24 hours before cooking at 230°F and as you can see the salt has migrated almost to the center during the hour and a half it took for the center to reach 135°F. "Diffusion is an exponential process, with the most dramatic movement early on. This is why a 30 minute brine is nearly as effective as a two hour soak." Click here for the technical details on Blonder's experiments, including a discussion of "Fick's Law" and the Gaussian equation he used to plot the diffusion. The bottom line Brines do not penetrate very far in short periods and the rate of penetration slows with time. But more penetration takes place during cooking than during the brining process because the heat excites the sodium chloride ions. The most important effect of salting is to improve the water retention of the surface, from which a lot of moisture is lost during cooking, and the amplification of flavor caused by salt.

Speeding up the process In order to speed the process, commercial meat processors use a big machine that injects brines. You can speed up the process at home by stabbing the meat extensively with a fork, knife, or a Jaccard device. It has a row of sharp knives that plunge into the muscle tissue cutting tough filaments and connective tissue and, along the way, creating channels for brine to enter. Jaccards are not a good idea for meats cooked to temps less than 165°F because they push bacteria from the surface deep into the meat. Above that temp, all the bad guys are killed. Another way to speed things up is to use a vacuum tumbler like the Marinade Express. You put the brine or marinade in a tank, add the meat (puncturing it first with a fork, knife, or Jaccard is a good idea), and then the machine sucks out the much of the air and rotates the tank, massaging the meat and helping distribute the brine. It can significantly cut brining or marinating time.

Other wet brine recipes The Blonder brine is the simplest most foolproof way to make a brine regardless of the type of salt you use. Here are some other recipes. If you use one of these brines you must use table salt or double the volume if you use kosher salt. Cookbook Basic Brine (7.7%). This is the recipe used in many cookbooks. Add 1 cup of table salt to 1 gallon of water for a 7.7% brine by weight. Use 1 quart warm water and 3 quarts cold. Dissolve the salt in the warm, and then add the cold. Simple Sweet Brine (7.6%). Adds a bit of sweetness to the meat. 1 cup of table salt + 1 cup sugar to 1 gallon of water. Produces a 7.6% brine by weight. You can use brown sugar, but sugar should exceed than the amount of salt. Use 1 quart warm water and 3 quarts cold. Dissolve the salt and sugar in the warm, and then add the cold. Equilibrium brining. In his highly technical but excellent six volume tome Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Nathan Myhrvold recommends an excellent but time consuming method. He recommends that we decide what we want the final salinity of the meat should be, say 1%. We then weigh the meat and the water, and calculate the amount of salt needed to make that weight 1%. We then dissolve that much salt in the water which will then be much saltier than the meat. The meat will absorb salt and with a salinity meter we check the water. When it reaches 1% we know that the meat is at 1% and we can start cooking. With this method it is impossible to overbrine. But it is hard to know how long to leave the meat in the brine the first time you try it.

Salting And Brining Tenderizes, Flavorizes, And Moisturizes

If you like your meat juicy, tender, and flavorful, there is one simple ingredient that can improve all three: Salt.

Salt, which is another name for the mineral sodium chloride (NaCl), is probably the oldest food additive and essential to all living things (click here to learn more about The Zen of Salt and the different types of salt).

Here's how salting and brining can significantly improve your cooking, how they work, how to make wet and dry brines, and how to use them. I'll even throw in a little mythbusting: Contrary to popular opinion, the main mechanism is not osmosis. And the best way to drive the salt into the meat is to cook it low and slow.

Below we will discuss how brines and salt work, and give you a foolproof recipe.

Salt and juiciness

When we are cooking meat, some water evaporates from the surface and some is squeezed out by cells and connective tissues that contract under heat. Lean cuts, like chicken breasts, turkey breasts, or pork loins can dry out easily when heat is applied, especially if you overcook them the tiniest bit. So you are faced with the problem of how to heat these meats to proper temps without making shoe leather. Surprisingly, salt can help.

Meat proteins are complex, long, and coiled. When sodium and chloride ions get into the muscles, the electrical charges mess with the proteins, especially myosin, so they can hold onto moisture more tenaciously. As a result, less is lost during cooking.

Salt and tenderness

Chewing takes energy and can give you a headache. Some meats, like the muscles the chest or rump of a steer, are tougher than others. Some of that toughness comes from connective tissues that wrap around muscle fibers and bundles, but some of it comes from the structure of the proteins themselves. Cooking meat to the proper temperature can tenderize it by relaxing the proteins, a process called denaturing. Salt can also denature proteins even before the heat hits them (click here for more on meat science).

Salt and flavor

Salt is a flavor amplifier, it suppresses the impression of bitterness, and it actually expands your taste buds. Many of us sprinkle salt on meat when it is served because it just makes meat taste better. Brining helps bring the benefits of salt to every bite, not just the surface.

How to bring salt to the game

There are several techniques that you can use to bring the benefits of salt to meat: Wet brining, marinating, dry brining, and injecting. This page will focus on wet brining. Click the links below for more on the other techniques.

Wet brining. Somewhere back in time, a primordial hunter felled a dear and it tumbled off a cliff into the ocean. By the time he and his buddies clambered down to the beach and pulled the waterlogged carcass up on shore it had soaked in the seawater, a brine about 4% salt, for more than an hour. They butchered it and schlepped the meat back to the camp where the women waited with a wood fire smouldering. Dinner that night was memorable. You can replicate the process around your campfire by making a salty brine and soaking your meat in it.

Marinating. Another solution (get it?) is to soak the meat in a flavorful marinade. Add salt to your marinade, and you should, and you have a wet brine. Read my article on marinades for more on the subject.

Dry brining. Another method is to dry brine. This is simply salting the meat in advance of cooking. The salt pulls moisture from the meat which dissolves the salt (NaCl) into sodium (Na) and chloride (Cl) ions. They then penetrate the meat and work their way towards the center. The problem is it is hard to be consistent in how much salt you sprinkle on the meat from one day to the next. Read my article on dry brining for more on the subject.

Injecting. Another effective method is to inject meats with water, brine, broth, even butter, margarine, or another flavorful fluid. If you do it right, you can add moisture and flavor. If you do it wrong your meat tastes totally weird, or you get pockets of liquid and hunks of dry meat.

Commercial meat packers inject brines into turkey, chicken, fish, and pork with rows of tiny needles like the ones at right from a Ruhl Brine Injector. These systems drive the brine deep, there is no waste, and it is fast.

Nowadays it is getting hard to find chicken or turkey that has not been pumped up with a brine. Injection is faster than soaking in a brine and also means processors can inflate the weight by 10% or so and charge the same for salt water as they do for muscle. Meat that is labeled "enhanced" or "flavor enhanced" or "self-basting" or "basted" has been injected with a salt solution at the packing plant. Kosher meat has also been treated with salt at the plant. Do not brine these meats. You risk making them too salty.

Read my article on injecting for more on the subject.

Wet brining

Wet brining works best on chicken breasts, turkey breasts, lean pork loins, salmon and other oily fish. Chicken thighs, turkey thighs, and other cuts of pork usually are moist enough from fat that they don't need wet brines. But it can give them a boost. I have been known to brine pork ribs on occasion, but most of the time, I don't bother. The return for the effort is minimal. I never brine red meats unless I am making corned beef. The added water tends to dilute their rich flavor.

Blonder Brine Amped Up (6.4%)

You will read a lot of recipes for wet brines out there, some with a dozen ingredients. Don't waste your money. Most of the spices and herbs in them are not water soluble and will not penetrate. A few stick to the surface and that's about the end of it. Some recipes say to use fruit juice, wine, beer, or even soft drinks instead of water, but they have a potentially hazardous side effect: Acidity. Acid can make your meat mushy, especially if you leave the meat in it for long. Other brines use stocks and broth. A couple of gallons of wine, juice, or broth can get expensive. Keep your brine simple.

This recipe uses garlic powder and finely ground black pepper. They are only partialy soluble in water. Try this experiment: Stir 1 tablespoon each of garlic powder and black pepper in a cup of hot water and let it sit for 30 minutes. Then pour it through a coffee filter, you get a dark potent liquid, but if you dry out the residue in the filter you discover that about 2/3 of the original weight is left behind. In other words, only about 1/3 dissolves.

Yield. Makes 1 gallon, enough for 6 pounds of meat. 2 gallons will handle most turkeys depending on the diameter of the container
Preparation. 10 minutes

Ingredients
1 cup hot water in a 2 cup measuring cup
1/2 pound salt, any type
1/2 cup white sugar
4 tablespoons of garlic powder (not garlic salt)
3 tablespoons finely ground black pepper
1 gallon cold water

About the salt. Any salt will do, table salt, kosher salt, "sea" salt. Step 1 below shows you how to get it right without a scale regardless of the type of salt you use. Click here for more about the Zen of Salt.

About the sugar. A good ratio for sugar to salt is 1/2 to 1 part of sugar to 1 part of table salt. Molasses dissolves faster in cold water, but it can color the meat. It is good with some meats, bad with others. Ditto for brown sugar which is colored with molasses. If you are diabetic, you can skip the sugar, although truth be told, very little actually gets into the meat.

About other flavorings. Herbs do not dissolve much in a brine so they do not penetrate, so don't waste your money. I have had luck with apple juice replacing some of the water, but I prefer turkey that tastes like turkey, not apple juice.

Do this
1) Add one cup of hot water to a two cup measuring cup. Then pour in salt, any salt, until the water line reaches 1.5 cups. The water will swallow up almost exactly 1/2 pound regardless of whether you use table salt, kosher salt, pickling salt, or sea salt. The volume of these salts may differ, but their water displacement will be the same. Pour the slurry into a very clean non-reactive container large enough to hold the meat and 1 gallon of water. Then add the sugar, garlic, and black pepper. Stir until most of the sugar is dissolved. The garlic and pepper will not dissolve. Then add the cold water.

2) Submerge the meat in the brine in a container and refrigerate. Chose your container carefully. It needs to be food grade, large enough to hold the meat and the brine with the meat submerged, and it cannot be made of aluminum, copper, or cast iron, all of which can react with the salt. Do not use garbage bags or a garbage can or a bucket from Home Depot. They are not food grade. Do not use a styrofoam cooler. It might give the meat an off flavor and you'll never get the cooler clean when you're done.

Zipper bags work fine. For large cuts get Reynolds Brining Bags, Ziploc XL, and XXL bags. If you brine in a zipper bag, periodically grab the bag and squish things around and flip the meat so the brine can get in from all sides. Place the bag in a roasting pan to catch leaks. You can also use bowls, pots, and Tupperware.

A 5 gallon drink cooler will handle turkeys and whole raw hams. If the cooler is larger, you may need to scale up the brine recipe to make sure the meat is submerged. The beauty of using a cooler is that you don't need to put it in the fridge. To keep the brine and the meat safe, toss in a gallon zipper bag filled with ice. Or two. The bags should be tight so that when the ice melts it doesn't dilute the brine. Don't use bags of ice from the store because they often have holes and leak and they are dirty. People often walk on them in the delivery truck.

Another option is to fill a quart juice or soda bottle with water and freeze it. Then screw on the cap. Wait until after the bottle has frozen because water expands when it freezes and it can blow off the cap. Wash off the outside of the bottle thoroughly and toss it in the brine.

4) When it is time to cook, remove the meat, rinse with cold water to wash off excess salt off the surface, and thoroughly pat dry with paper towels. Patting dry is important or the surface might steam and not brown properly.