Pressure and vacuum marination does not work (2016)
genuineideas.com
genuineideas.com
What is missing is a basic explanation of how marinating or brining does work, which should be at the beginning. Even the green-dye test is missing the obvious case where you marinade for say 24 hours.
For one, I think brining and marinating is more than just tasty molecules diffusing into the meat. Informally, the proteins will dissolve or denature in the brine over time. It should be obvious, then, that the vacuum has no impact on this chemical process, but also that this dye test doesn't show anything about this process either.
Second, and I want to know more about this if it's not correct, my understanding is that the salty brine or marinade actually draws water out of the meat at first as due to osmosis trying to achieve equilibrium. Then, the salty marinade is drawn back into the meat, again trending towards equilibrium. It's not just a simple process of random diffusion as this article suggests, but osmosis across a gradient. And osmosis actually does occur faster with higher pressure, but just not enough to matter here. I'm also curious if salt helps the dye at all.
https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/dye.html
... supporting the logic that marination is mostly a surface treatment, and thus there's not that much point in waiting a full day to marinate something, but rather just enough time for the marinade to "penetrate" the surface layer that's as far as it's going anyways. Which is why, for instance, if you read a Kenji recipe, it's going to suggest marinating for "at least 30 minutes".
Shopper's Corner (a boutique market in Santa Cruz) has the most amazing marinated meats I've ever tasted, and their trick is that they run them overnight in a vacuum tumbler. Presumably a regular tumbler would have the same effect.
When I lived there, one of my favorites was a teriyaki ribeye. It was obvious from color that the marination fully penetrated the meat - steaks have striations and tumbling opens them up. So you can get a lot more surface area mechanically.
There's also the option of "mechanical tenderization" - basically poking a zillion holes.
Yes, I have something like this
https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_S...
But I've found that making bite-sized morsels is much simpler.
[0]:https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19723027W/The_Science_of_Coo...
Dry-brining cuts out the unnecessary added water by using the natural moisture content of the meat to create a concentrated brine that, when given enough time, is naturally absorbed back into the meat before cooking.
Season a steak with kosher salt, and within a few minutes, you will witness osmosis at work: Liquid from the steak will bead up on the surface of the meat, drawn out by the salt. Wait another ten minutes, and that liquid from the beef will have started to dissolve the salt, forming a concentrated brine
Edit: it's not the same plot at all but this reminded me of the short story, "The Nothing Spot" (1978): http://vintage.failed-dam.org/nothing.htm
I wish more browser apps had a reading mode
If, as the author contends, meat can be regarded as a water-saturated matrix of proteins [1], then the pressure inside the meat will rise to match the external pressure. The only way for a pressure differential to form would be if the matrix formed a very rigid shell (even a slight flexibility would allow the pressure to equalize), but it does not.
Furthermore, because water is almost incompressible, this occurs without any appreciable change in volume. The author suggests that if the matrix compresses, then that will expel water, but this will only be the case if the voids in the matrix become smaller. It's more likely, I think, that the only change would be that the walls of the voids will become thinner, as the water inside the voids can follow the pressure increase without changing appreciably in volume: in effect, the water inside the voids supports them against the pressure outside.
All of this assumes the pressure is being applied equally in all directions, which is the case if you are applying the pressure to the marinade, rather than squeezing the meat in one direction.
[1] Or a cellulose matrix in the case of vegetables.
Just playing devils advocate. I really don’t know how this works.
The one used in the article was half an atmosphere. On the other hand, a pressure cooker goes up to a full atmosphere, and in half an hour can produce meat that tastes like it was marinated for a day or two. Yes, the heat helps here too, but that’s not enough on it’s own: boil a piece of meat in something like beef broth for that long and you don’t get a result anywhere near the pressure cooker, not at all.
So pressure can absolutely make a difference, just not the low end food-saver countertop versions used for simple preservation and storage of food.
It absolutely is. Biochemical reactions run exponentially faster as temperature increases. In most cooking, the limiting factor on cooking speed is that water (and, thus, any food that contains water) can't be heated beyond 100°C without boiling away, so the food never exceeds that temperature. Pressure cooking breaks that limit by using pressure to raise the boiling point.
I was just focused on heating being enough and not pressure and the only reason water gets to that point is pressure.
Though I wonder if you can get the same result of a pressure cooker by submerging meat in oil heated to 250 degrees Fahrenheit
What you want is to coat the meat with something that prevents water from escaping: usually a tempura batter.
The only parts of the meat that get above 212 are the surfaces in direct contact with the heat source.
I'm just saying that if you plunge it directly into oil at 180°C, that's what's going to happen.
Nobody does this for "cooking", but you can try to do it, as an experiment.
There's even a recipe for a chicken made in lava (actual volcano) and it doesn't go faster than a normal oven.
That's why one coats nuggets in batter for example; batter turns into a hull and traps the water, preventing it from escaping the meat; and the cooking is fast and thorough because of the high temperature.
Consider for example deep fried meat. You can deep fry a steak and achieve even higher temperatures but the the oil will not pervade it nearly as much as the liquids around that same piece of meat in a pressure cooker. Instead the deep fried meat can become tough because the moisture boils and the oil is not forced into to provide a replacement
Paraphrasing from memory:
"One of the best preserved secrets in haute-cuisine is that the best way to perfectly cook a steak/filet mignon is to deepfry it and then sear it in a pan at very high heat."
Haven't tried it, but I buy it. I would think the deepfrying is fast enough to avoid making the meat too dry. And I personally don't really find briney water oozing out of my steak to be all that sexy anyway.
That is the exact myth which is addressed by the article we're discussing.
The linked article’s author showed that counter top food savers aren’t effective, but I’d trust the university’s food science department when it comes to the broader use of pressure in general, specifically when used with heat as in a pressure cooker, which uses significantly more pressure.
Rather, what that (comparatively) low pressure of a pressure cooker is doing is raising the temperature at which water will boil. So that means that the meat will become way hotter. Much hotter, in fact, than putting it in a scorching hot oven, because even in a hot oven the inside of the meat can only go above 100⁰C when the water inside boils away.
Tacking a payload onto the spare anchor isn't unheard of, and if you need more depth then a weight on a leaded line is fine. If you leave it out with a buoy, use more rope than you think you need to not lose it in a current. The pulley is just a nicety if you're not hauling in a bunch of steel; the water displacement makes it so anyone in good shape can haul in a couple thousand pounds of fish by hand.
Also, salt water corrodes basically everything. Good stainless isn't too badly affected. Bronze is better. You'd want to make sure a cooling system like that didn't have a stray charge buildup.
[0]https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/beef-recipes/homemade-sa...
No idea if it does help, but that is exactly what the 'marination mode' on chamber vacuum sealers does. (And also disables the sealing bar.)
Sometimes I inject meat with a salty brine. I only expect a fraction of the fluid to survive the cooking process.
Commercial meat processing does that (injecting salt water mostly to both preserve the meat and make it heavier so it sells for more money).