brining and sous vide

My $0.2 not having tried it is that it would have completely adverse results.

First off you don't want to brine too long unless you use the equilibrium, I'd want to make sure

that the chop is clean and rested from the brine and probably seared before going in the bath,

having the additional salt in there combined with the increased temperature

- I suspect you'd end up pulling out every

lick of moisture you had there from the get go and you'll end up with a very salty and tough piece of

meat - Just a guess based on what I know and have read.

If you cook in an equilibrium brine, you'll get a perfectly fine result. If you cook in a traditional, high salt content brine, you'll definitely over do things and end up with salty meat that has a cured texture.

@Chris - COOL! I was really pondering that bit.

I'm gonna have to go over the lesson on equilibrium brining again ...

Brandon__67713

If you are looking for that "sweet" brine dark caramelization can you add sugar to equilibrium brine?

Absolutely, but realize that you'll want far less than you would use compared to a traditional brine. Basically, you should think about what percentage of sugar will taste good in the meat when it's reached equilibrium. In general, that will be around 1% or less, and you should treat the sugar much like the salt when doing the calculations.

But cooking in an equilibrium brine won't speed up the brining process right? So you'd still have to account for the brine time before cooking, you just may not have to have the added step of removing the food from the brine if it was bagged?

@Brendan, so you're planning on putting the protein and the brine in the bag and then cooking it in the brine? I've always removed the product from the brine and rinsed it well before cooking ...

@jack you wouldn't need to do that with an equilibrium brine since the salt content will never exceed the amount you added initially

Thanks @B, like I said, time to revisit the equilibrium brining lesson here!

@Brendan_Lee — Cooking in the brine will speed things up, although I haven't really worked out a good rule of thumb for how much.

@Jack_Mayer — Yes, you can cook with an equilibrium brine, although it's important to keep in mind that the combination of heat and salt will tend to do more to denature the proteins in a muscle food more than either alone. So if anything, you might want to decrease the cooking temperature by a degree or so and make sure to work with a very light equilibrium brine.

Okay, from that last comment I wasn't completely off base.

This is rather interesting. I can see a great use-case for being able to do it?

Package tons of porky stuffs and just drop in the bath.

What would happen with a pre-sear, brine bath, sear?

Not totally sure Johan. But if you give it a try, please let us know how it works. I don't see any reason, however, that it wouldn't work fine.

Chris

@Chris - thanks for the feedback! Y'all rock!

Sumit__65166

@chris i'm yet to try the equilibrium brine but i'm definitely going to do that in near future.

i use mostly usukuchi and occasionally tokusen soy sauce. i also add salted sake and/or shaoxing wine.

i wondering if i can calculate sodium, and use that as guide for equilibrium brining. in theory, it should work, right?

@chris I am testing this today, albiet not as scientifically as i'd like. I have two pieces of salmon very close in size that will be put in an equilibrium brine. One will brine in the fridge for 60min (i know the recipe calls for 45 but for science's sake I am making this equal to the time the other one will be in the circulator) and then unbagged and cooked like the salmon mi cuit. The second piece was bagged with the brine and thrown directly into the circulator. To make it more scientific I wish I had bought a third piece to leave unbrined.

I'll report what I find.

Ok so here's what I did and found.

Salmon "A" - 135g in weight, placed in an equilibrium brine of 540g water, 27g sugar, and 54g salt (Piece on the right in the pic)

Salmon "B" - 147g in weight, placed in an equilibrium brine of 588g water, 29.4g sugar, 59g salt (Piece on the left in pic)

Procedure:

Salmon "A" was placed directly into the brine, cryovac'd for 45sec and left in the fridge for 60 minutes. It was then removed, rinsed, and rebagged with a small drizzle of olive oil and cooked at 41C/60min. Removed and chilled in an ice bath placed in the fridge for 4.5 hours

Salmon "B" was cryovac'd with brine for 45sec and dropped directly into the 41C bath for 60 minutes. Removed, unbagged, rinsed, and rebagged to chill in the same ice bath.

Results:

The appearance of both pieces of fish was similar. I thought there was an immediate color difference when each piece was removed from the bath but the color appears to have equalized after the chill in the fridge.

The texture of both fish was similar. I couldn't tell Salmon "A" from "B" in terms of texture.

Flavor. This is where I found a difference. Salmon "A" was noticeably saltier than Salmon "B". Both were pleasant in flavor so this is not to say that it was over-brined but Salmon "B" had a much more rounded flavor and less of a pronounced saltiness, almost as if the warming of the brine caused the flavors to mingle more than they would have in the fridge temps. There were no discernable differences in smell from either fish either.

All in all, I think I'll bag and cook directly in brine for fish from now on to save me a step. Now I wonder how this would work with higher cook temps though. Will have to test that some time.

DiggingDogFarm_65362

@Brendan_Lee

So, you didn't add the weight of the fish and water together when you calculated the equilibrium brine?

Did you notice a salt gradient from the outside to the inside of the fish?

~Martin

No noticeable gradient. I actually calculated the brine by just punching in the weight of the fish into the scalable mi cuit recipe so I never thought about any other additional steps. Which now that you point that out seems very off, hmmm... I never stopped to think about that, I just threw the numbers into the scalable portion of the recipe.