Calculating Immersion Brine Recipes

[Oddley]

captain wassname, If you are going to pump, then method 1 is perfect because you can calculate the ingoing. for an immersion cure I've explained it here

[jane]

Charles is standing by his theory (and I must stress that this is only a theory) He says that the water would enter the meat in the first few hours (with its solutes) as a mechanical process i.e not a chemical reaction. He was talking about there being some sort of electro - static attraction between the muscle fibres and the water. This might be to some extent relative to the strength of the brine and happen less effectively with stronger brines due to the higher sodium ion concentration. The effect of salt on muscle fibres is to reduce their capacity to hold water so at some point the movement of water begins to reverse and is aided by the slower diffusion process where the salt molecules begin to move towards even distribution throughout the meat and brine.

He thinks/guesses that this 'pickup' might be around 10% of the weight of the meat which would tally with the FDA calculation. If it were 10% and the brine was a 40 degree brine - around 10% salt - then a 1kg piece of meat would pick up 100mls of the brine - and this would contain around 10g salt which is relatively low.

If Charles is right about the process (and I am not totally convinced) I am not at all sure how far this helps in any practical sense as it still only gives a vague idea of how long to leave the meat in the brine. - It would suggest, though, that the overall process of salts getting in to the meat happens to a great extent at the start of the brining and does not happen in a linear way. This would be the case even if he is wrong, of course, due to the gradual reduction in the concentration gradient between the meat and brine as the salts diffuse in to the meat.

Jane

[Oddley]

Jane, there is an experiment going on at the moment here. The results so far indicate, about 1.5g salt have gone from the 40 g in the brine, into the meat, in a 48 hour period. This I'm afraid, blows your boyfriend's theory out of the water.

[NCPaul]

Jane / Charles - Oddley's response is not nearly as harsh as you might take it. I have read quite a bit on this site and I think there has been a lot of frustration in dealing with the calculations (meant for commericial producers) issued by the US FDA. They have worked out their response based on good science (I hope) from a large scale producer. We are not. A theme thru many threads is speculation about what happens without any data (a source of frustration). On this site everyone wants to get it right; I wouldn't have joined it otherwise, and niether would you or the others. I am very empirical by nature and have offered to do an experiment (not necessarily a good one) to help guide us. Look carefully at the data and help me (and this request is open to all) to design the next experiment. My boss used to say, "If you do enough experiments, you don't need a theory." This was not good news to me.

[jane]

Charles' theory is about mass movement of water and solutes within the first few hours of immersion. This movement would not affect the concentration of the brine left behind which is what this experiment shows. It would affect the amount of salt and water in the meat and the volume of brine left in the container. It is, however, only a theory.... It is OK, We will not take offence at being proved wrong - so long as there is no outright abuse! We are simply looking for answers.

I suppose you could disprove Charles' theory by weighing a piece of meat every hour following immersion to see if there is any weight gain.

NCPaul, What your experiment seems to me to demonstrate really clearly is the diffusion gradient and the fact that the loss of salt from the brine slows with time.

Is anyone able to draw a graph of the results?

I wonder how these results can be applied to different sized and shaped pieces of meat?

[Oddley]

If I have upset or offended anybody, please excuse me, that was not my intention.

[wheels]

I wonder how these results can be applied to different sized and shaped pieces of meat?

...and that's the crux of the issue. NCPaul's experiment will only tell us what happens in a piece of meat of the shape and size he's used. Hopefully, it will indicate the time a small piece of meat, of a shape often used by members, takes to reach equilibrium and which method of calculation to use. This will help us to be confident in the advice we give. It won't necessarily tell us anything about other shapes and sizes of meat though.

Phil

[jane]

Oddley, I was just responding to NCPaul. No offence taken.

Jane / Charles - Oddley's response is not nearly as harsh as you might take it.

[Oddley]

Jane, I've been trying to get my head around solute drag (Convection), I've read some papers on it, but to be honest, it's like reading another language.

So I went to a site that explains cloud formation, or convection to children. I could just understand that...

I don't know if this is right, but my understanding of it is, the water is the driver of the process, because there is a higher concentration of water in the brine, it will try to equalize with the less concentrated water in the meat, through the semi permeable membranes of the cells, dragging along with it salt and other ingredients (mass movement), but if the solute solution is too concentrated, there will be a back osmotic pressure slowing the process down.

Is this right?

[jane]

That is pretty much exactly it: Where the water goes it drags its solutes with it. A really good place to look for the science of it is to search for the principles of dialysis. Dialysis removes toxins, excess salts and water from the blood of people whose kidneys don't work using diffusion, osmosis and solute drag (convection) - all of which are used in curing. The theory about solute drag as far as home curing is concerned completely falls down if there is no movement of water (in dialysis the water moves because of positive pressure and for commercial curers positive pressure can be created...)

Salt is a relatively small molecule and can pass quite easily through membranes. Because of this it does not exert a very strong osmotic pressure - unlike sugar which is a much larger molecule. This might mean that you would need quite a strong brine to exert much osmotic pressure.

The bit of Charles' idea that I am not sure about is that he thinks there must be some sort of what he calls 'mechanical' reason for movement of water in to the meat as well. Initially he called it a 'sponge effect'. We discussed this a some length and I am still not fully convinced.

Whether a natural movement of water in to the meat is the reason for the FDA method 1 calculation I am really not at all sure.

[Oddley]

Thank you jane.