Brining Technique Pt 1

INGREDIENTS

INSTRUCTIONS

This article is from the March 25, 1998 San Francisco Chronicle.  READY
FOR BRINE TIME Salt and spices put old-fashioned flavor back  into
modern meats Janet Fletcher, Chronicle Staff Writer  Have you had it
with tasteless, juiceless pork chops and sawdust  chicken breasts? Many
professional cooks have, too, which is why  they're turning to an
age-old technique to restore the flavor and  moistness that many meats
used to have naturally.  In a growing number of restaurant and home
kitchens, brining is  putting the juice back into pork chops and at
least some taste back  into factory-raised chickens. By soaking the
meat for hours or days  in a seasoned salt-water solution, cooks find
that they can transform  lean pork and poultry with minimal cost and
effort.  "This brining, it's become an urban legend," says Pam
Anderson, Cook's  Illustrated executive editor who has written about
brining for the  magazine and jokingly calls herself "the brine queen."
Anderson once  roasted more than 30 turkeys to find the best cooking
method,  settling on an overnight brine as an essential first step.
"Every  time we do a poultry story now," says Anderson, "we find that
salt is  the answer."  With brines, cooks like Anderson are trying to
compensate for the  shortcomings of modern animal husbandry. Chickens
raised to market  weight quickly on carefully formulated feed don't
have the flavor of  those old-time barnyard hunt- and-peckers. Nor does
pork have the  taste appeal it used to. Bred for leanness to
accommodate  contemporary concerns about fat, American pigs are 50 to
70 percent  leaner than they were 20 years ago, says East Bay sausage
maker Bruce  Aidells. Fat, whatever its other failings, contributes
moisture and  flavor.  "When they decided to market pork as the new
lean white meat, they  completely ruined the product," complains Nancy
Oakes, chef at  Boulevard in San Francisco (and Aidells' wife). "If you
cook pork  loin at home, you end up with this hard, dry, very lean
white meat."  In response, Oakes began brining pork several years ago
at L'Avenue,  her former San Francisco restaurant. At Boulevard, a
spit-roasted  pork loin, brined for four days, is a menu fixture, and
brined turkey  breast with applesauce is a favorite staff meal.
Aidells, too, is a brining convert. His forthcoming book on meat, due
this fall from Chapters Publishing, will include a small treatise on
the practice. "To be honest with you," says the meat maven, "unless
you're really careful, it's damn near impossible to produce a decent
pork chop without brine."  The succulent cider-cured pork chop at San
Francisco's 42 Degrees  testifies to brining's merits. Chef Jim Moffatt
swears by the  technique, not only because it infuses the meat with
flavor but  because it gives the kitchen a larger margin of error. A
brined chop  will stay moist even if it's cooked a little too long.  By
what mechanism does a little salt water work such magic? "It's our  old
friend osmosis," says Harold McGee, the Palo Alto specialist in  the
science of cooking. "If there's more of a diffusable chemical in  one
place than another, it tries to even itself out."  Because there's more
salt in the brine than in the meat, the muscle  absorbs the salt water.
There, the salt denatures the meat proteins,  causing them to unwind
and form a matrix that traps the water. And if  the brine includes
herbs, garlic, juniper berries or peppercorns,  those flavors are
trapped in the meat, too. Instead of seasoning on  the surface only, as
most cooks do, brining carries the seasonings  throughout.  Aidells
calls this technique "flavor brining" -- done not for  preservation
(which would require a saltier solution and longer  immersion) but for
enhancing texture and taste. Even a couple of  hours in a brine will
improve bland Cornish game hens, says Anderson,  or give chicken parts
a flavor boost before deep-frying or grilling.  Brines vary
considerably from chef to chef, as do recommended brining  times. But
generally speaking, the saltier the brine, the shorter the  required
stay. And, logically, the brine will penetrate a Cornish  game hen or
duck breast much faster than it will penetrate a thick  muscle like a
whole pork loin or turkey breast. Meat left too long in  a brine tastes
overseasoned and the texture is compromised, producing  a soggy or
mushy quality.  Most cooks start their brine with hot water, which
dissolves the salt  and draws out the flavor in the herbs and spices.
But they  continued in part 2

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