SALON

Tuesday, Mar 23, 2010 5:24 PM UTC

Brining meats is amazing. How much sodium does it add?

Ask the food geek! Today: Brining meat makes it wildly juicy. Here's how to figure how much salt it really adds

By

Topics: Food Advice, Cooking techniques, Food,

Brining meats is amazing. How much sodium does it add?

Dear Salon Food:

My doc told me to “watch my salt intake.” If I brine a chicken or a turkey or a rack of ribs, how much is the normal salt content increased?

Alan 

Dear Alan,

I feel you. Brining is one of those things that’s easy to pick up and hard to put down. I mean, all you do is drop what would be dry, mild meat — chicken breasts, say, or lean pork, or, of course, turkey — in some salty water, let it hang out for a bit, and it comes out juicy and flavorful. Magic! It takes maybe two minutes of your time and a little forethought, and your dinner goes from sucky to succulent. There are few better cost-benefit deals in the world, let alone in cooking. (For an interesting overview of how it works, including revisiting old high-school chemistry terms like “diffusion” and “osmosis,” click here.)

But there is a cost, as you suggest, in terms of sodium intake (and sugar, since many brine recipes call for sweetness to balance the saltiness). So I dusted off my pencil for you to see how much salt (and therefore sodium) ends up getting into meat you brine. Yes, it’s word problem time, kids! I’m not the sharpest pencil in the bookbag, so if I can handle this math, so can you. So: A plane carrying a cup of table salt takes off heading west at 12 p.m. going 1,002 km/h…

Since Cook’s Illustrated is who turned me on to brining lo this many years ago, let’s go with its OG all-purpose brine recipe from the November/December 2001 issue:

(by weight; volumes are in parentheses):
32 ounces water (1 quart)
2.5 ounces salt (½ cup Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt; ¼ cup table salt)
3.4 ounces sugar (½ cup)

Add these up, divide, and you’ll find that salt is 6.6 percent of this solution, which is a little on the intense side of the 3 percent-6 percent salt in brines Harold McGee discusses in his classic of food science, “On Food and Cooking.” So an effective brine can be made with nearly half the salt and sugar cut from this recipe (though Cook’s doesn’t recommend it).

Properly brined meats can soak up about 10 percent of their weight in brine, which is to say that if you have 1 pound (16 ounces) of meat in our brine, it will absorb 1.6 ounces of the solution.

So, 1.6 ounces x 6.6 percent (the percentage of salt) = .11 ounces of salt, or 3.25 grams, which is how much salt you add to your pound meat by brining it according to this recipe. Depending on your perspective, of course, this might seem like a lot or not much at all. If just seasoning meat superficially, I might use a little more than half this amount of salt.

But let’s convert that salt to sodium and see where we stand. Remember that salt is not pure sodium, but rather, chemically, only 40 percent. So, accounting for that, 3.25g salt = 1300mg sodium, or just over half of the U.S. RDA of sodium, 2,400 milligrams. But that’s in a whole pound of meat, and if you’re regularly eating a whole pound of meat in a sitting, you might have bigger nutrition problems than what’s in the brine.

Cook’s Illustrated, the ever-lovable geeks that they are, went my homespun math a step further and just sent their samples off to a lab for sodium analysis. Their findings pretty much jibe with mine (pork = 1,161mg sodium per pound), but with an interesting twist. In their test, chicken absorbed significantly more brine, up to 1,673mg of sodium per pound. Which means that brining might be more effective (yum!) — and therefore more sodium-intense — for chicken than pork.

But more important, it highlights that there’s no real good way to answer Alan’s question, because there are always so many variables involved: even controlling for the brine recipe, one meat might absorb somewhat more or less than another; lean muscle might absorb differently than fatty tissue; bones might affect the way you weigh, etc., etc., etc.

Still, I hope this helps as a general guideline, or you may want to do the math for yourself according to your own cooking if you’re really diligent. But I have to say this: I’m not the brightest mathematician on the block and a worse chemist, but I am good enough of a lawyer to tell you that if you have health or diet issues, you should talk about them with your doctor or nutritionist. I mean, how can you believe anything important you read on the Internet?

If you have any food or cooking questions we can sleuth out for you, send them to food[at]salon[dot]com. 

Francis Lam is Features Editor at Gilt Taste, provides color commentary for the Cooking Channel show Food(ography), and tweets at @francis_lam. More Francis Lam.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 18 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
161 points162 points | 7 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
147 points148 points | 25 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
65 points66 points | 14 comments
vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
79 points80 points | 31 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
39 points40 points | 4 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations