Brining: for more tender meat with more flavour
If you want to make meat or fish more tender, you can marinate it. You can also just do that in salt water! With brining, a dry chicken breast is now a thing of the past.
What is brining?
Brining is an age-old technique for preserving food. There was a time when there were no refrigerators and freezers available. By brining, the slaughtered meat could still be eaten in the winter months. We now almost no longer use the brining technique to extend the shelf life of the food. We now mainly brine for the taste and to make the meat more tender.
Brining food is also anything but complicated. You don’t need any special kitchen tools. You probably already have the ingredients for brining at home. In brining, we marinate the piece of meat or fish in water to which a certain amount of salt has been added.
What can you pickle?
Brining has been done for hundreds of years to prevent food from spoiling or to give it more flavour. The brining technique is therefore deeply rooted in Dutch cuisine. There is therefore a good chance that you already regularly eat foods that have been brined.
Well-known examples of pickled food are, for example, the Dutch Nieuwe herring, which is pickled in salt water. Salmon and mackerel are also always brined before we cold smoke them. But also when making cheese, the freshly pressed cheese is placed in the brine. You can actually pickle everything.
Wet or dry brining
There are a number of ways you can pickle. Depending on the desired result, you can choose a wet brine or a dry brine. In America, brining is very popular and both brining methods have different terms there. Brining is comparable to our wet brine. Pickling in salt, our dry brine, is known as ‘curing’.
A dried ham or a dried fish such as stockfish or cod are pickled in salt. The salt concentration is therefore high and therefore these products have a longer shelf life. A cooked ham that has been brined therefore has a lower salt concentration and therefore has a shorter shelf life than a product that has been brined dry.
Dry brine
With a dry brine you only use salt and no water. By rubbing salt on a product and then letting it soak in, the salt will remove moisture from the meat. Weight is often used for extra pressure on the product. Sometimes with extra herbs and spices, for example in the case of Gravad Lax – the Norwegian pickled salmon.
The result of dry brine is different from the wet variant. The concentration of salt on the surface of the product will exceed six percent. The result is that the salt will remove moisture from the meat and therefore have a longer shelf life, but the tissue structure of the product will also change.
wet brine
A wet brine uses considerably less salt. Most people experience the taste of wet brine as tasty and much less salty than food that has been cured dry.
Because less salt is used with a wet brine, the product will absorb water. The salt will dissolve in the water and concentrate on the surface of the muscle cells. The ions repel each other, just like two negative magnetic poles, and space is created in the muscle cells. The meat will therefore absorb water and gain weight. Read more about the chemical process of brining here.
The fact that the meat contains more water is one of the biggest advantages of brining. During baking, meat always loses moisture, which means that meat will become dry and tough if it is baked for too long. When you brine meat, it contains more moisture. Just like with sous vide, brining will make the meat more tender . The added salt will also make the meat tastier.
How do you brine meat?
The recipe for wet brining meat is fairly short. And actually quite simple. You don’t need anything other than water and salt to pickle. You can add additional seasonings to the water if you wish. Bay leaf, freshly cut peppers, ginger, honey, sweet soy sauce or just sugar. All aromatics that provide extra tasty meat.
Add sugar
Apart from taste, the use of sugar in brining has another reason. The sugar has no influence on the structure of the meat, but will ensure a better browning. The sugar added during the brining and the proteins in the meat are a good combination for a nice Maillard reaction.
What kind of salt for brining
In principle, you can use any kind of salt for brining. Sea salt is always a good choice, but other types such as normal table salt or the more expensive Fleur de Sel can also be used.
How much salt do you need?
How much salt you need when wet brining meat or fish depends on the total weight of the product and the water. A salt concentration of about 10% is usual. Do not use more water if necessary to submerge the product and add up the weight of the meat and the water. You take one-hundredth of that as the amount of salt and dissolve it in the water.
Basic recipe for brining meat
This recipe is a good starting point for brining meat. Optionally, you can choose to add other seasonings. You can vary in this at your own discretion, thyme, garlic, juniper berries, cinnamon, ginger or lemon zest.
The ingredients
- 0.5 liters of boiling water
- Bay leaves, piece or 5
- 100 grams of salt (e.g. sea salt)
- 1 tablespoon cloves
- 1 tablespoon peppercorns
- 50 grams of sugar
Roadmap
- First, determine how much brine you need to make. Place the meat in a bowl or container and add enough water to cover the meat. Remove the meat from the container and measure the amount of water. That is the amount of brine you need to make.
- We use between 50 and 75 grams of salt per liter of water.
- Bring half a liter of water to the boil and dissolve the required amount of salt and sugar in it. You can also use other seasonings if you wish. The sugar ensures a better browning later when the meat is baked. When the salt and sugar have dissolved, you can add the rest of the water.
- Place the meat in the cooled brine and cover with foil. Place the container in the refrigerator. Count on marinating for 2 hours per 500 grams of meat.
- After the meat has marinated long enough, remove it from the brine. Pat it dry with kitchen paper. Large pieces of meat or poultry are best left uncovered for a few hours to dry. This ensures a crispier crust when baking or roasting.