Saturday, November 28, 2009

THE FOOD LAB: TURKEY BRINING BASICS

in the spirit of the thanksgiving season (and christmas to come)... thought i'd share this interesting post on "brining" turkey from The Good Eater blog by way of "SeriousEats.com".
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THE FOOD LAB: TURKEY BRINING BASICS




Note: This column is syndicated from SeriousEats.com, where I write regularly about the role of science in the kitchen. Please visit their wonderful site! Have a question that needs answering? Email me here, and I’ll do my best to respond in a future post.

20091103brining turkey open %organic food

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

If my mom’s roasting skills are representative of the nation’s, then I’ll assume we’ve all experienced dry turkey. I’m not talking the kind that frays around the edges as soon as a carving knife comes close to it or that instantly turns to sawdust when it hits your tongue—I’m talking the kind that is just good enough that you can still smile and say nice things during dinner, but just bad enough that you wonder why the pilgrims couldn’t have eaten prime rib during that first fall.

The problem, as we all know, is with overcooking. So first, a quick look at what happens to turkey (and other meats) as it cooks.

  • Under 120°F (48.9°C): The meat is still considered raw. Muscle cells are bundled up and aligned in long, straight cable-like fibrils wrapped in a sheath of elastic connective tissues, which is what gives meat it’s “grain.”
  • At 120°F: The protein myosin, begins to coagulate, forcing some liquid out of the muscle cells, which then collects within the protein sheath.
  • At 140°F (60°C): The remaining proteins within the muscle cells coagulate, forcing all of the liquid out of the cells, and into the protein sheath. The coagulated proteins turn the meat firm and opaque.
  • At 150°F (65.6 °C): The proteins in the sheath itself (mainly collagen) rapidly coagulate and contract. Like squeezing a tube of toothpaste, all the water what was forced out of the cells and has collected within the sheath, is now squeezed out of the meat completely.Congratulations, your turkey is overcooked.

Thanks to all those who pointed out that I should include temperature conversions in the future

Although the government will have you believe that 165°F is the minimum temperature to cook your turkey to, clearly you need your turkey to be within the 140 to 150°F range to ensure juiciness.

Below this range, and the moisture is still locked within the muscle cells. This is why raw meat tastes slippery instead of juicy—your teeth aren’t sharp enough to liberate the moisture from inside the cells. Above this range, and the liquid has already gone and found a new home. But even with an accurate thermometer, you run into a problem. It may seem obvious to say it, but roasting cooks meats from the outside in. So at normal roasting temperatures—say 300°F—by the time the center of the bird is at 145°F, the exterior layers of your bird will be much higher, closer to 180 or 190°F. the result is slices that are perfectly moist and tender in the center, but overcooked and dry around the edges.

Enter brining, the process in which a lean cut of meat (like turkey, chicken breast, or pork) is soaked in a salt water solution to help it retain moisture during cooking. Sure, sure—this is nothing new. The Scandinavians and Chinese have been extolling the virtues of brining for millennia, and Cook’s Illustrated has for at least a decade. But the thing that is odd to me is that people can’t seem to agree on how it works—even the experts.

Brining Basics

20091103raw turkey %organic food

Let’s start with what it actually accomplishes.

Spoiler Alert: One of these breasts is not like that other. In a few moments, I’m going to throw all three into a 300°F oven, roast them until they are 145°F in the very center, then quickly sear them in a hot skillet until their skin is a beautifully crisp, burnished golden brown. Only one of them will emerge fully tender and moist. The other two will end up dry and stringy around the edges.

For this experiment, I started with three nearly identical fresh, non-kosher (kosher breasts come pre-salted), non-enhanced (turkeys that come injected with a saline solution, I.E. Butterball’s and Jenny-O’s) turkey breasts (I admit, two were right breasts, and one was left).

One of them I left totally untreated before roasting. The second, I soaked overnight in a 6% solution of salt water (about 1/2 a cup of kosher salt, or 1/4 cup of table salt per quart of water). The third breast was a control that was soaked in pure water, just to ensure that it’s actually the salt in the solution that is affecting the quality of the meat.

20091103cooked brined turkey %organic food

In order to gauge moisture loss, I weighed each breast at all stages of the process—straight from the butcher, just before roasting, just after emerging from the oven, and just before slicing, making sure to subtract the weight of the fat deposited in the roasting pan from each breast to compensate for any differences in fat loss.

Here’s what happened:

20091103 turkey brining graph %organic food

The blue line represents the untreated turkey breast, which ends up losing around 24% of its weight in moisture-loss during cooking. The brined turkey, on the other hand, lost only about 15% of its weight, while the water-soaked turkey lost around 20%. Clearly, brining works, and it’s specifically the salt in the soak that helps the turkey retain moisture while its cooking.

And the best part? Since a brine works from the outside in, it affects precisely those areas of the turkey breast that are most prone to drying out—the exterior layers.

Let me demonstrate:

20091103 labelled sliced unbrined turkey %organic food

This is a macro shot of two slices taken off of the roasted, unbrined turkey breast. Now, don’t get me wrong—if someone served this to me at a Thanksgiving meal, I’d be more than happy to eat it. In fact, the very center of the slice is absolutely perfect. But as you can clearly see, it’s the last half-centimeter around the edge that starts to dry out.

Now, take a look at this:

20091103 labelled sliced brined turkey %organic food

These are two slices taken from the brined turkey breast. Even the outermost layers, which rose to temperatures well in excess of 150°F, are still moist and juicy, forming perfectly smooth, even slices.*

*I apologize for the slight blurriness of the focus on the front of the slices—this is a photographer error, and not a poorly executed airbrushing job.

How it Works

So the salt solution is somehow helping the turkey retain more moisture as it cooks. But how?

One common explanation is that it is pure osmosis, the movement of water across a semi-permeable membrane. Cell walls are designed to allow water and small molecules to move in and out of them freely, while preventing larger molecules from entering or leaving—this is how it gets the raw materials it needs to live without losing any of its “guts.”

This movement of water and small soluble compounds is controlled by osmotic pressure. Essentially, whenever there is an imbalance of the concentration of solutes across two sides of a permeable membrane, water will pass through the membrane until the concentration is equalized.

So how does this explain brining? Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t, and we can prove this without even knowing the concentration of solutes inside the cells to begin with. Let’s look at three possible scenarios.

  • Scenario 1: There is a higher concentration of solutes within the cells.

    In this case, in order to equalize the concentration, water should flow from the brine into the cells. Seems to make sense—except that as we’ve already seen, soaking in pure water is less effective than soaking in salt water (see graph above). If osmotic pressure was the only thing bringing water into the meat, then a soak in pure water (which creates a higher differential in solute concentration between the interior and exterior of the cells) should force more water into the cells than a soak in salt water.

  • Scenario 2: There is an equal concentration of solutes within the cells.

    In this case, osmosis does not even enter into it. There may be an exchange of solutes as sodium ions change places with small molecules inside the cells through diffusion, but this should have no effect on the amount of water taken up by the meat

  • Scenario 3: There is a lower concentration of solutes within the cells.

    In this case, the laws of osmosis state that water would migrate from within the cells to the outside. Your turkey meat should actually dry-out even more if your salt solution is too concentrated.

In a bid to demonstrate that osmosis is not the key factor in brining, I conducted an experiment based on scenario three: I brined a turkey breast in a fully saturated salt water solution (I.E., a solution with as much salt as I could possibly dissolve in it)—around 35% salt by weight—and compared it to a turkey breast in a 6% brine solution.

20091103high salt vs low salt brining %organic food

While the fully-saturated-brined turkey on the left had outer layers that were inedibly salty (remember—diffusion), both turkeys lost about the same amount of weight during cooking, indicating that rather than effecting osmosis, the salt must be doing something entirely different.*

The Answer

Turns out that the real answer has to do with the shape of proteins. In their natural state, the muscle cells are tightly bound within their protein sheaths—this doesn’t leave much room for excess water to collect in the meat.

But as anyone who has ever made sausages or cured meats knows, salt has a powerful effect on muscles. A 6% solution of salt will effectively denature (read: unravel) the proteins that make up the sheath around the muscle bundles. In this loosened, denatured state, you can now fit more water into those muscles than in their natural state. Even better, the denatured proteins in the sheaths contract far less as they cook, therefore squeezing out much less moisture.

Now, given that most of you food nerds have probably been brining for years, is knowing all this really going to make your turkey taste better this Thanksgiving?

Nope. But at least it gives you something to talk to your relatives about besides gluten formation in laminate pastry pie crusts.

*Disclaimer: I know I’m going to eventually get beat up in the comments section for not mentioning this, so I will say now that yes, osmosis does actually enter into the equation in a minor way: as salt diffuses into the actual muscle cells, they break down some of the cells internal structure, releasing solutes into it. Provided your brine concentration is low enough, this can create a difference in osmotic pressure that will cause some water to actually migrate into the cells themselves instead of just into the protein sheaths surrounding them.

That said, once the turkey is cooked and the liquid is squeezed out from within the cells, it is the moisture trapped in the protein sheaths that gives the sensation of juiciness—not the liquid that was inside the cells before it was even cooked, as is clearly demonstrated by the last experiment using a fully-saturated brine solution.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Serious Eats Blog: Turkey Burgers That Don't Suck

Not a huge turkey burger guy, but i have recently begun making some ground chicken meatballs for my toddler and thus i'm interested in ground patty recipes that use poultry vs. beef. below find a blog posting from "Serious Eats" that i found to be good reading, and i'm looking forward to trying this recipe one day.

Note: i like to add a little applesauce to ground poultry. it seems to give a little sweetness and moisture without adding to the fat content.
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The Burger Lab: Turkey Burgers That Don't Suck

It's time for another round of The Burger Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post.

20091112-turkey-burger-composite.jpg

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Seriously Meaty Turkey Burgers

- makes four 5-ounce burgers -

Although packaged turkey meat will work, for best results, grind your own meat in a meat grinder. Marmite or Vegemite can be found in the international aisle of most supermarkets.

Ingredients

1 small eggplant, about 6-8 ounces
1 teaspoon olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 anchovy filet, mashed to a paste (or 1 teaspoon anchovy paste)
1/4 teaspoon marmite
1 pound boneless, skinless turkey thighs, cut into 1-inch cubes.

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 400°F and set wrack to upper-middle position. Rub eggplant with olive oil until coated. Season with salt and pepper. Wrap with aluminum foil and set on rimmed baking sheet. Roast until completely tender, turning once, about 30 minutes. Allow to cool slightly, remove from foil, and scrape flesh away from skin. Chop flesh until fine purée is formed. There should be about 4-6 ounces of purée.

2. Combine soy sauce, anchovy, and marmite in small bowl with back of fork until homogenous and marmite is completely dissolved and anchovies are smooth. Toss meat with anchovy/soy/marmite mixture until thoroughly coated (if using pre-ground turkey, mix together by hand until homogeneous). Place feed shaft, blade, and 1/4-inch die of meat grinder in freezer until well-chilled. Meanwhile, place meat chunks on rimmed baking sheet, leaving space between each piece and place in freezer for 10 minutes until meat is firm, but not frozen.

3. Pass meat through grinder. Combine with eggplant purée. Form into four patties. At this point, follow your favorite burger recipe to cook the patties, making sure to cook them to at least 145°F.

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There are a few things in life that—no matter how many times I've seen them—always make me ask, "Why?" Right at the top of this list, rubbing shoulders with ludicrous creations like Jar-Jar Binks and talking heated toilet seats in Japanese airports is that culinary absurdity, the turkey burger.

Now, I've always been of the mind that if you're going to eat a burger, you're in it for the flavor, not for your health. So for the 15 minutes it takes to scarf one down, all diets be damned. If saturated fats and cheese product are what make it taste great, then pour it on!

So why bother with a turkey burger? If turkey burgers that I've had in the past are any indication, the answer is simple: don't. The only times they ever approach being edible are when they are so packed with herbs, cheese, and other seasonings that not only are they no longer any healthier than beef, they are also no longer burgers—they're more akin to turkey meatloaf in patty form on a bun.

More to satisfy my own culinary curiosity than to strive for a noble goal, this week I decided to try to discover the secret to making turkey burgers that don't suck. I set myself a few parameters at the outset:

  • The only meat in the burger must come from turkey. No cheating by adding pork fat or beef fat, or any other kind of imposter.
  • The final fat content must be reasonably close (within a couple of percentage points) to pure ground turkey. I'm trying to appeal to the widest turkey-burger-eating audience is possible, which I'm guessing includes a lot of low-fattists.
  • The burger patty should taste like turkey, not turkey-loaf. I wanted my burger to be juicy, robust, and meaty, without hiding behind a veil of herbs and spices.
  • The burger must not suck.

he results were unequivocally horrid

With these four goals in mind, I started testing, beginning with the simplest thing I could think of: 100 percent pure ground turkey, cooked in exactly the same manner as I'd cook a beef burger. Whether it was breast meat or leg meat, the results were unequivocally horrid: Dry, lean, and bland, the patties had the texture of particle board with the flavor of a not-quite-fresh towel (that is to say, not as bad as an old gym towel, but nothing that puts a smile on your face like a Downy-fresh towel).

To simplify matters, I decided to focus on one aspect at a time, first trying to improve the flavor, before moving on to fixing the texture.

The Flavor

2009111207-umami.jpg

What do all these things pictured have in common? That's right: glutamates.

lutamates are the molecules that lend this umami sensation to foods

We've all been around long enough to have heard the word umami, the Japanese term for the sensation of "meatiness." It's one of the five basic tastes that are sensed directly on the tongue (the others being salty, sweet, bitter, and sour), as opposed to the vast majority of what we perceive of as "flavor," which is actually created by aromatic compounds stimulating receptors in our soft palates and nasal passage.Glutamates are the molecules that lend this umami sensation to foods, and are a salt of glutamic acid, an amino acid found in abundance in certain things like seaweed and cheese. It can be bought in crystal form as monosodium glutamate (aka Ac'cent).

Like salt and sugar, glutamates have the ability to enhance certain qualities of foods without actually changing their flavor profile, making them the ideal candidate for—pardon the expression—beefing up my turkey burgers.

20091112-umami-composite.jpg

To test the effects of different sources of glutamates, I made a series of one-ounce ground turkey thigh burgers that I mixed with various glutamate-rich ingredients:

  • Hon-dashi: A dried, powdered form of dash, the Japanese broth made with sea kelp and smoked bonito flakes. While sea kelp on its own can contain up to3200mg/100g of glutamates, the amount in powdered dash is considerably less—closer to 1,000mg/g.
  • Pure MSG powder: To be used sparingly. By the way, any time someone claims to be allergic to MSG, just point out to them that Parmesan cheese is about 1 percent glutamic acid—a far higher concentration than is in your typical container of take-out Chinese food.
  • Dried porcini mushrooms: While mushrooms themselves only contain about180mg/100g of glutamates, drying them concentrates this amount.
  • Parmesan cheese: This is a heavy hitter, with around 1200mg/100g.
  • Marmite:. The most concentrated of the lot at 1900mg/ 100g. Marmite (and vegemite) are made with yeast extract, the same ingredient that food manufacturers add to canned beef broth, allowing them to create soups that taste meaty, even when they contain almost no meat at all.
  • Soy Sauce: Asides from high salt levels, soy sauce has got around1,000mg/100g.
  • Anchovies: A common addition to French stews, anchovies are on the same level as soy sauce, with about 1,000mg/100g.
  • Worcestershire Sauce: Remember the old Lea & Perrins commercials? "Lea & Perrins—for a better steak." Well, it's the 800mg/g of glutamates that do the bulk of its work.

2009111214-patties.jpg

I tasted them in batches of three side-by-side and against patties made with pure turkey, and immediately discarded porcini, hon-dashi, parmesan, and worcestershire sauce from the running—their underlying flavors were too distinctive, distracting from the overall turkey-ness of the patty. I also decided to leave the pure MSG powder out of the running. Although I often cook with it, it's a controversial ingredient that makes some people squeamish, so I figured if I could make these patties work without it, all the better.

This left me with soy sauce, marmite, and anchovies. In a moment of weakness, I decided to forgo my rigorous testing protocols and just went ahead and threw all three into my next batch. Woot! That's some meaty poultry! Using all three of them in conjunction with each other was better than simply upping the amount of any single one. But why?

here is a new hot molecule in town that's been preening for the spotlight

Turns out that when it comes to umami, glutamates aren't the only players in the field.There is a new hot molecule in town that's been preening for the spotlight. I'm sure we'll all be hearing about soon: inosinate. Although inosinates don't add much umami flavor on their own, they act in synergy with glutamates, causing them to bind more tightly to receptors on our tongue; They are the Robin to glutamate's Batman—they aren't necessary for the job, but holy savory ground meat patties! do they sure help a lot. Anchovies happen to be extremely rich in inosinates, so when used in conjunction with glutamate-rich marmite and soy sauce, the three work much better than the sum of their parts.

The Texture

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With flavor settled, I moved on to texture. Again, it would have been quite simple to add some pork fat to the mix and call it a day, but I wasn't here to take the easy way out. The texture of turkey suffers for related two reasons, both of which arise from the fact that the patty has to be cooked to well-done in order to be eaten safely. First, the proteins in a ground meat patty form an intricate, cross-linked network that tightens up and contracts as it's heated, making the patty turn tough. Secondly, as it's doing this, it squeezes moisture out, which dissipates into the air, leaving your burger high and dry. What I needed to do was introduce an element that would prevent the meat from forming a network that is too tight, while at the same time providing some additional moisture. I broke my possibilities down into three categories:

20091112-grains-dairy-composite.jpg

2009111212-eggplant-shroom.jpg

  • Dairy: Asides from adding a trivial amount of fat, both milk and eggs contain proteins that can interfere with the cross-linking of meat proteins, creating more tender results (think bolognese sauce made with milk, or a meatloaf made with egg). I tried cottage cheese, yogurt (which also contains enzymes that can break down meat proteins), ricotta, and whole egg.
  • Grains and legumes: Grains contain starch molecules that have a tendency to hang on to water very tightly. In addition, if distributed well enough, the pieces of grain should physically interfere with the meat proteins binding with each other. I tried white bread made into a panade with a bit of milk, crushed crackers, cooked lentils, cooked ground pasta, and cooked rice.
  • Vegetables: I picked vegetables that have a relatively neutral, but meaty flavor—eggplants and mushrooms (okay, technically a fungus, not a vegetable). My hope was that since vegetables don't start losing structure until higher temperatures than meat, they would help retain some of the interior moisture. For the eggplant, I first roasted it in the oven, incorporating the purée into my meat.

Dairy was a washout. None of them significantly improved moisture level, and while the meat was softer, it was almost mushy, like something that had already been partially digested, as opposed to merely tender. Grains were not much better. Bread crumbs and cracker crumbs kept the turkey burgers moist alright, but the texture was more akin to meatballs—all softness without the robust meaty texture of a real burger. Lentils, pasta, and rice didn't fare much better. The surprise winner?

he eggplant actually helped the turkey meat brown better, further improving its flavor

Eggplant, by a landslide. Once I roasted it and added the mushy purée to the meat, it completely blended in—you literally couldn't tell it was there. All you got was a patty that despite being well done, was moist and tender, while at the same time being robust and meaty. On top of that, the eggplant actually helped the turkey meat brown better, further improving its flavor.

When I finally combined the results of my flavor experiments with my texture tests, I had a burger that was not only good for a turkey burger, it was actually a good burger, period. Robust, juicy, tender, with a meaty turkey flavor that really stood out, instead of hiding behind a veil of seasonings. Granted, any health benefits this patty may have given me were completely obliterated when I melted two slices of agedCabot cheddar over the top and slathered on a few tablespoons of mayo, but to each their own, I suppose. I've been known to order my veggie burgers with bacon.

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N.B. Under extreme time duress, I made the mistake of buying Whole Foods brand hamburger buns—the only damn buns they sell in there! This is a mistake that I do not wish anyone else to make. Go commando if you must, but avoid these ghastly, cottony things at all costs!