Grill is ideal lab to test culinary hypothesis

By Christine Barbour

I'm sure you can eat off their floors. These people mean scientific business as they test ingredients, recipes, and equipment, and their results are fascinating They discover the tastiest tortilla chips, the best pepper mills, the most delicious recipes for lasagna. 

If only they warned hapless viewers not to try these stunts at home.

Here we are in my test kitchen. Spotless and pristine ended long before the guests (I'm sorry, the testers) ever arrived. There's a lot of traffic here — it feels more like a railway station than a kitchen. The only lab coats in sight are on our retrievers, coincidentally also the only volunteers prepared to eat off the floor. But we mean business too, possessing the enthusiasm if not the skill and organization of the ATK people. 

The subject up for testing on this stormy Saturday evening is brining. That's right, brining, as in salt water. The thing we commonly do to pickles and corned beef, but less commonly (and more deliciously) to pork, chicken and shrimp. 

Mouthwatering

As a way of plumping up lean meats before subjecting them to the heat of the grill or the oven, brining is enjoying something of a culinary renaissance. To some people it is old hat, the obvious first step to a mouthwatering roast chicken, a juicy grilled pork chop, a firm and flavorful shrimp scampi. 

New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser's mother took brining so for granted that, when she passed her recipe for oven fried chicken on to her daughter, she forgot to tell her to soak it in salt water, leaving Hesser to wonder for years why her chicken never tasted as good as mom's. 

For some critics, however, brining seems like so much culinary mumbo jumbo. Why would you soak a shrimp in salt water? They live in salt water, for crying out loud.

Well, yes. But bear with me.

Grilling and roasting, two of America's favorite cooking methods, can make food taste mighty good, but they also tend to dry it out. For fatty foods, like a marbled steak or a plump duck, this is not a problem. The heat melts the fat (which holds much of the flavor), distributing it throughout the meat and keeping the whole moist and yummy. Lots of us eat these meats on the rare side anyway, so the cooking process stops before all the fat is melted away.

Pork and poultry are another story. Leaner to begin with (pork today is 50 percent leaner than it was 50 years ago, for instance, and poultry is bred to have more lean breast meat) these are also meats that, for health reasons, we usually cook to a higher degree of doneness. The result can be shoe leather. 

Tricks of the trade

The meat industry has tried to combat what their breeding practices have wrought by enhancing some kinds of meat like pork and turkey (the famous self-basting Butterball is an example). Enhancing usually means that the meat is injected with water, salt and phosphates to keep it moist, prolong shelf life and, incidentally, make it weigh more (a not insignificant factor when you are paying by the pound). 

The only way to tell if meat is enhanced is to read the label very carefully (although often it doesn't say), ask the butcher or taste it. Enhanced meat has a salty flavor and, some people say, a chemical aftertaste. Much of the pork in Bloomington grocery stores has water and phosphates added. 

If you are not into paying hefty prices for salt water, or you don't like the idea of unfamiliar chemicals being added to your food, you can prevent your flame-kissed dinner from becoming a desiccated husk by adding some nice familiar chemicals yourself. Sodium chloride (that's table salt, to you) dissolved in water with some sugar (or any number of other seasonings) makes a cheap and simple brine that can raise your grilled pork chop, chicken breast or Thanksgiving Day turkey from the shriveled to the sublime. 
 

'All about balance'

The way brining works is pretty straightforward. As my kitchen science guru Alton Brown says, "it's all about balance." If a piece of meat is put into a solution that is saltier than the inside of the meat, the cells of the meat open up to allow the solution in until an equilibrium is reached. Depending on what's in your brining solution, that may also mean that good flavors like sugar, fruit juice, spices or herbs get drawn into the meat as well. Even if you just use salt water, you are plumping up the meat cells and giving them some protection against the relentless heat of the grill or the oven.

Experts claim brined meat has many virtues — it tastes better; it's firmer and juicier, its skin is crispier and it can even be overcooked (to a point) with impunity. My purely anecdotal evidence has tended to bear this out. When I serve brined chicken at dinner parties, guests go nuts. One husband threatened to kill his wife if she didn't brine chicken for him (she hasn't and he didn't, leading me to wonder if these people are really serious about food), and another guest set off on a serious brining spree himself (and in fact, suggested brining as the topic of this column). When I posted a recipe for brined Thanksgiving turkey on a family Web page, nearly everyone tried it, to rave reviews.

The grand experiment

But anecdote is not, alas, science. Although the America's Test Kitchen people have done their own brining tests, we thought that Bloomington should try to hold up its end. Unfortunately (or fortunately) our test gave new meaning to the concept of a blind study. We prepared chicken and pork chops both with and without brining, intending to grill them up and ask a panel of highly qualified friends and family members to pick their favorites. As it happened, by the time we got to grilling it was dark, the grill was crowded, and the brined and the un-brined became hopelessly mixed up (along with the cooks). 

Luckily for us, brining really does make a huge, delicious difference. The succulent flavorful brined meat was easily identified, rendering the test kitchen successful even if it wasn't very pretty. Brining rules! It's even safe to try at home.
 

Simple brine for pork, poultry,  salmon or shrimp

Brining Suggestions

Contact Christine Barbour via e-mail at cbarbour@heraldt.com. Food Fare partner Jennifer Piurek will tell us next week about the trials — and the culinary sacrifices — of slimming before marriage.