The Science of Brining

[120ThingsIn20Years]

My wife loves those turkey breast rolls as well but we always get the Steggles, in fact we are having one today. Just checked, lists sodium but no phosphate.

They've always been pretty good, I tart it up a bit with crispy bacon. It's not as good as a whole bird but when cooking for two a whole one is just too much and I've yet to find fresh turkey portions that were any good at all.

I'm pretty new to brining but have been using sea salt and seems to work well, I do wonder if there is enough iodine in ordinary table salt to make any much difference though. Isn't it only there to keep the salt free running ? I just checked on the Black and Gold stuff we have around, says potassium iodate so not free iodine.

I can see how it might react with metals though under heat, even though it is the least reactive of the halogens.

Chemistry, after all salt is sodium chloride and chlorine is a MUCH more reactive halogen

Cheers

As I understand it Iodine is added to salt to guard a population against various diseases. I doubt it would be needed with the typical Australian diet because we truck so much food around that almost everyone would be eating at least some root veggies from near the coast, but I'm pretty sure that's why it was added in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodised_salt

wikipedia seems to confirm this.

It also slightly interestingly says this... "An opened package of table salt with iodide may rapidly lose its iodine content through the process of oxidation and iodine sublimation."

I did say it was only slightly interesting

[120ThingsIn20Years]

I had some more thoughts on measuring electrical resistance to see when to swap the brine for a marinade to make the most of stage three in the brining process, and think the reason why I couldn't work it out the first time was that the meat doesn't have a single point in time where each of the three phases actually finished. If you drop in a whole chook, the legs and wings would have finished stage three before the inside of the breast had even seen it's first taste of brine (if it ever does).

As a layer of meat is in say the second stage, the layer under it is in the first, and the layer above it could be either stabilised at it's final water and salt content, or perhaps fluctuating all over the shop based on the state of the brine, and the state of the layer under it.

So...

It might be possible on a more uniform piece of meat.

But it might also not ever be possible because of the interaction of the different layers, going through the process at different times.

I think I'll have to try again.

If I can make some sense out of it, I can now program PICAXE chips, so I should be able to make a device with an alarm that screams at you when it's time to replace the brine with a marinade