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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Curing red meat is probably a bad idea; it toughens and changes the color of the meet. When he was still at the French Culinary, Dave Arnold did a triangle test where he simply salted a steak prior to a low-temp cook --- he didn't leave it salting for days, just hours --- and all his tasters could identify the pre-salted meat and all preferred the non-pre-salted meat.

Another thing to bear in mind is that brining poultry will make the skin intractably flabby. You can air-dry the meat after your brine it (I had a fan setup to do that), or remove the skin prior to brining to compensate.

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Well, the salient point there is "prior to a low-temp cook". In that post:

http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-sa...

Arnold was using sous-vide on the steaks, which has much different cooking characteristics than high heat cooking.

I've generally found that liberally salting steaks with kosher salt up to several hours in advance of grilling or roasting improves the flavor and texture substantially. Serious Eats backs me up, here:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips-fo...

In what way would the cooking characteristics of a low-temp cook exacerbate the curing effect of salt on meat, apart from the fact that low-temp cooking takes longer?

Well, in the case of sous vide it would be in a sealed bag, under pressure, cooked longer. I would hypothesize that the increased pressure would help with brine solution penetration of the meat. The sealed bag prevents moisture loss to the environment. The lengthened cooking time would mean more time for the brine solution to effect the contracting muscle filaments, and more time for the solution to be pulled into the muscle cells.

This isn't what we want. We want the salt to effect the outside of the steak the most, the portion that will be exposed to high heat when searing, because that's where the most water loss will come from.

With a slow cook in a combi oven, the characteristics would be still different.

Steaks aren't typically cooked under vacuum pressure. Dave Arnold uses Ziplocs for steak.

Not when he's going to re-therm. Also, from the post I linked above:

  A rib-eye was salted, seared, placed in a vacuum bag, 
  and cooked at 55 C for 1.5 hours, chilled, stored for 
  two days, rethermed at 52C for one hour, seared, and 
  served

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