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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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