Brine Calculator

Brine Calculator

The app that help you to calculate the quantity of salts to brine your meat.

The goal of brining is to apply enough salt to meat or seafood that the food retains more juices during cooking and that flavor is enhanced. Food is brined for either flavor or preservation. Concentrations below 0.5% are seasoned perfectly for eating, but are too low to kill most bacteria. Levels above 2% unwind, densify and dry out muscle fibers, leading to the classic cured meat texture. Above 5%, saltconcentrations are high enough to kill most bacteria, but the food is way too salty to eat, and has to be washed out or diluted with other ingredients to become palatable. Above 10% meat is being salted forlonger-term preservation. In gradient brining, the meat is placed in a 6% or higher solution which is strong enough to kill bacteria on the meat's surface.

Assuming the muscle group remains intact, has not been perforated with needles or knives, and the lymph nodes have been removed or are uninfected, bacterial contamination inside meat is rare. So, an hour or two in a strong brine acts as a disinfectant. More often, the same brine is used to quickly flavor the meat. For example, a large turkey might be brined in a 6% solution for 24 hours. The salt concentration will run from 6% at the surface, to near zero a half inch below the surface (it could take a week for salt to diffuse all the way to the center of a thick brisket or turkey breast). The meat is then removed from the concentrated brine and cooked. The salt band moves rapidly inward, propelled by heat of cooking. Assuming the surface brined layer is a third of the total turkey volume, this second diffusion step averages out the salt level to around 2%.Quick and convenient, thought not as uniform or as effective as equilibrium brining at retaining moisture during cooking. In equilibrium brining, the meat is placed in a low concentration brine until the meat's salt level and the brine's salt level average out.

Which might take a few days or weeks- our calculator estimates the curing time based on the meat's shape and thickness. Often, equilibrium brining is used to prepare a bucket of chicken wings or slices of meat for grilling, which are too gnarly for uniformly applying a dry brine. In that case, use the total weight in the calculator to determine the salt level, but input the thickness of a single piece of meat to estimate brine time. Assuming you frequently agitate the meat in the brine. A quarter or a half percentsalt level is typical for equilibrium brining.

Today, most curing brine is done using curing salts that contain sodium nitrite (NaN0 2 ), a highly reactive compound. But that high chemical reactivity means that nitrite tends to become depleted quickly. So for longer cures, like those used to make country hams and slowly dried, fermented force meats such assalami, nitrite's more oxygenated cousin, sodium nitrate (NaN0 3 ), is used along with it. Certain kinds of salt-tolerant bacteria, often added as a commercial culture, provide a long-term source of nitrite within the meat by steadily transforming nitrate to nitrite. Nitrite partakes in many chemical reactions that prevent the growth of some toxic spoilage bacteria, preserve the appealing red color of myoglobin, prevent rancidity and warmed-over flavor, and even enhance flavor. USDA prescribed a nitrite level of 150 parts per million, about 0.12 g per kg of meat.