Equilibrium Brining

chefsteps.com/activities/equilibrium-brining

Scale the Food and Water

Weigh 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'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.

Calculate and Add the Salt Required

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%.

Equilibriate
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.

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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'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.

The Effects of Brining

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.

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