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michaelnatkin

Question from Ethan promoted from a comment on a different post. Great question!

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Ethan_Danstrom_36006

I would love to see some of the chemical reasoning behind the recipes. I have no idea why they chilled the salmon for 6 hours at the end of that recipe.

Chris_Young_80640

Ethan:

Happy to explain. The low temperature cooking step begins the process of transforming the salmon from a raw to a cooked texture, but if you were to eat it straight after cooking it would still seem rather close to a half-cooked texture. Recall that the salmon has been salted. After cooking, the salt continues to interact with the proteins in the flesh to finish transforming the texture from half-cooked to the dense, fork-tender texture that we wanted to achieve. This process of the salt finishing the cooking takes time, hence the reason it needs to refrigerate for at least 6 hours after cooking. Does this answer your question?

Cheers,

Chris

Brendan_Lee_56950

Is that specific to fish? I.e. would a piece of chicken firm up if chilled for 6 hours in the fridge as well?

michaelnatkin

@BeeLee - Chris says:

This is true of any proteinaceous food. So yes, chicken and other meats and seafood will all continue to firm up after cooking if salt is present in the food. Essentially, this is an accelerated curing process. For poultry and fish this can often be an improvement to the texture, but for some cuts, like steak the texture seems to be less appealing to most people.

Brendan_Lee_56950

Good to know. I have gotten in the habit of seasoning my proteins sans salt and then vacuum packaging them and freezing them and then seasoning them pre-sear post-sous-vide cooking. Do you think if i salted them before being frozen it would make a difference in texture?

Chris_Young_80640

Yes, it would generally firm the meat or seafood and leave it tasting less juicy later.

Chris

Patrick_Ancillotti_6135

For what it's worth, I tried it without the icing, and it was sort of a slimy nastyness :P but after some time in the fridge, much much better...

Chris_Young_80640

Yes, the salt will have helped to extract a lot of protein during the cooking. If you eat it without chilling it long enough for the protein in the gel, well, it would be a lot like eating half-set gelatin—not nice.

Patrick_Ancillotti_6135

@Chris : My wife used another way of describing it

Snot, came to mind.

Chris_Young_80640

Yep, that sounds about right.

Patrick_Ancillotti_6135

@chris: I sent her this thread, and she agreed once more

Brendan_Lee_56950

what would be the minimum time to rest after cooking?

prince_of_porcelain

Will the reaction of the salt eventually reach some sort of equilibrium, or will it continue to react indefinitely? 6 hours seems much longer than it will take to chill through, so I am guessing that the drop in temperature doesn't halt the reaction. What would happen at 12 or 24 hours? Is there a maximum time that you should allow the salmon to chill/set after cooking?

Brendan_Lee_56950

From what I understand the chilling is not for the salt per se, it's to allow the gel to reset to give it a firmer texture. Kind of like eating jello too soon, it's not pleasant.

prince_of_porcelain

@Brendan - That's what I originally thought, but Chris's post (2nd post in thread) above suggests that the salt continues to interact after cooking. It sounds like there's more going on than just the gel resetting, but I'm not sure. As I read it, the cooking step set off a secondary reaction with the salt, almost like an activation energy.