ChefSteps

Digital scale

* <a href="http://amzn.to/THe9NY">Weigh</a> the total amount of meat or seafood plus water. In general, use an amount of water equal to at least 50% of the weight of the meat. If you won&#39;t be vacuum packing the meat with the brine, then use enough water to submerge the meat.

* If the meat has a lot of bone, subtract the approximate weight of the bone.

Scale the Food and Water

* Calculate how much salt you need to add by multiplying the total weight from step 1 with the desired final concentration of salt. Then dissolve all of this salt, plus any other seasonings, into the water for your brine.

* For most meats and seafood, the final concentration of salt in the flesh should be between 0.25% and 2%. A higher salt concentration will help retain more juices during cooking and yield a firmer textured flesh.

* For delicate seafood we suggest 0.5–1%, for white meats 1.5–1.75%. Most tender cuts of red meat do best without brining, or very low concentrations where the brined texture goes unnoticed. 

* This approach can also be used for wet-curing. Simply increase the salt concentration to between 2–4%.

Calculate and Add the Salt Required

* Brining and curing are diffusion processes, just like heating, that scale roughly with the square of the thickness: a piece of meat or seafood twice as thick will take four times as long for the brine or cure to penetrate. A thin cut can take a day or so, but a large roast can take weeks.

* Equilibrium brining is at least 20–30% slower than brining with a high concentration brine, for the same reason that cooking sous vide to equilibrium temperature is slower than traditional cooking techniques. But, just like sous vide cooking, the approach avoids the need to time things just right. 

* Unlike cooking with heat, however, it&#39;s usually no big deal if a food is under-brined, whereas over-brined from too much salt is a much bigger deal than overcooked. Over-salted food is simply inedible, a pitfall of conventional brining that this strategy entirely avoids.

Equilibriate

* Charged chloride ions from the dissolved salt in a brine will repel, destabilize, and unravel various proteins within the muscle fibers of meats and seafood. This is not altogether different than what cooking with heat also does to these proteins. 

* The combination of dissolved salt and heat combine to increase the juiciness of flesh by drawing water in during brining and squeezing less of it out during cooking. 

* Brined foods that are cooked have a telltale texture because the combination of salt and heat creates a firmer, more elastic gel than heating does alone. But avoid overdoing it, otherwise the flesh can become too firm and chewy, as well as too salty.

The Effects of Brining

The goal of brining is to apply enough salt to meat or seafood that the food retains more juices during cooking and that flavor is enhanced without curing the flesh in process. This challenge is analogous to cooking to a particular core temperature. You can cook at a temperature higher than the desired doneness and try to time the cooking just right. But if the center is perfectly done, the part near the surface will inevitably be overcooked. The alternative is to cook at the desired final core temperature and wait for the entire piece of food to reach equilibrium with the cooking temperature. This is the typical approach used when cooking sous vide. With brining, you have the same choice: brine the food in a very strong salt solution and then remove it before it is over-salted, or soak the food in a brine with just the right amount of salt. The latter is our preferred approach because it does away with all of the guesswork. We call it equilibrium brining.

Equilibrium Brining