Smoking Meat: The Complete Guide to Smoking Meat Techniques by Tina Mills

Author:Tina Mills [Mills, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Published: 2016-05-25T21:00:00+00:00

The basics of brining

The larger your slab or piece of meat, the longer it will need to remain in the brine. Small pieces of meat such as shrimp will only need to be brined for about twenty to thirty minutes, but large slabs of ribs or a whole turkey, for example, will need to be brined overnight, or for at least eight hours in most cases.

But be careful, because if your brine your meat for too long, it will cause it to dry out and the salt will pull out any moisture or water that is remaining in the fibers of the meat.

To ensure that this doesn’t happen, you should only use brine that has the right concentration of salt in it, especially if you’re going to be brining your meat overnight. Small pieces of meat, fillets of fish, or shrimp will do just fine in a brine that has a high concentration of salts because it is only being immersed in the brine for twenty to thirty minutes.

However, if you’re going to be brining larger pieces of meat or brining overnight, a general rule of thumb to follow is to include nine and a half inches of salt in your brine for every gallon water. The exception to this is if you use kosher salt, which is significantly bulkier than table salt and dissolves faster as well. If you’re going to be using kosher salt, you will need at least two gallons of it for every gallon of water that is present inside of the brine.

When it comes to the container or pan that you should use for brining your meat in, any container that is non-reactive is completely safe and suitable for the process. You may want to consider using a different kind of container depending on the type of meat that you will be brining.

For brining chicken or turkeys for instance, it’s perfectly acceptable to use plastic containers for brining.

After the brining process is completely, always wash off your meat under cold and running water to remove the salt that is present on the surface. The meat itself shouldn’t taste very salty after it has been brined, and the contrary should taste very juicy. Just find the right amount of salt concentration like we just talked about and your meat will be properly moistened.

Is brining or marinating your meat completely necessary for smoking your meat? No, so don’t treat it like a necessary step. Just treat it like a highly recommended step, because brining or marinating meat is by way and large one of the most effective preventions that you will have against your meat from drying out.

Many people who want to smoke meat are turned away by the extra hours that you will have to invest in the process, but experienced meat smokers know full well that it is highly worth the effort.

Finally, brining or marinating your meat also adds a lot of badly needed flavor to your meat as well beyond the smoke of the wood.

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