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Brining pork chops


billyhill

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As stated, A family emergency intervened with dinner plans and I have pork chops that brined for 3 and 1/2 days in standard brine (~1 cups morton kosher salt to 1 gallon with some sugar). Are they still uusable? They have been removed from the brine and refridgerated them, they smell O.K.. Hate to waste them, but I am concerned.

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Put them in plain water and hope the salt comes out?

This is my skillet. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My skillet is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I must master my life. Without me my skillet is useless. Without my skillet, I am useless. I must season my skillet well. I will. Before God I swear this creed. My skillet and myself are the makers of my meal. We are the masters of our kitchen. So be it, until there are no ingredients, but dinner. Amen.

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I was going to suggest cutting a small piece and frying it up to see how it was -- with that information, we could be more helpful (or unnecessary). But if you're already cooking, go for it. If they're too salty to eat, you'll still have great seasoning for just about any sort of bean soup you care to make.

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Eat more chicken skin.

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Your brine was a 6% brine (240g salt to 3785 g of water.=(6%) depending on the weight of your chops, the salt level would probably be something less than 6% , thats pretty salty,,, something about 3% is probably gonna be OK...(just depends on the weight of the chops...)

Bud

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I was pretty darn sure it would be too salty, it was. I grilled it with smoked paprika, cumin, black pepper, and a little spanish paprika. I added a little more smoke with a fresh thyme, savory, and oregano/marjoram mix on the coals. Taste was respectable if you could have overlook the salt (no way possible).

I had a chicken and chineese cabbage (homegrown "Taisai" from Seeds of Change) soup working on the back eye when I had a half baked idea. I thinly sliced half the pork and added it to the soup base with some crimini mushrooms and a little magi seasoning. Wound up pretty good with a subtle smoky quality adding nicely to the mushrooms and slightly bitter greens. I was just too cheap to quit.

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Or do as Dakki suggested and soak in fresh water to restore them - same approach as for a Christmas ham, or salt cod, or various other salted products.

QUIET!  People are trying to pontificate.

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I was pretty darn sure it would be too salty, it was. I grilled it with smoked paprika, cumin, black pepper, and a little spanish paprika. I added a little more smoke with a fresh thyme, savory, and oregano/marjoram mix on the coals. Taste was respectable if you could have overlook the salt (no way possible).

I had a chicken and chineese cabbage (homegrown "Taisai" from Seeds of Change) soup working on the back eye when I had a half baked idea. I thinly sliced half the pork and added it to the soup base with some crimini mushrooms and a little magi seasoning. Wound up pretty good with a subtle smoky quality adding nicely to the mushrooms and slightly bitter greens. I was just too cheap to quit.

Did you notice a textural difference? I would think that much salt would make the outer part a bit mushy...?

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No, I did not notice the texture getting mushy at all, by the time it cooked it was quite firm.

I sliced it thin and added the pork with the jus off the plate to the soup, tossed in the greens and let residual heat finish the deal. It was a big hit at work the next day.

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  • 2 years later...

I grilled pork chops this evening in the way I've done them very successfully before and had not so good results. Problems: under cooked and too salty. Possible issues: brined them using brine from At Hoc at Home overnight. Way too salty and took much longer to cook. I did 4 mins per side as usual and way under done. Finally got them cooked through after more time only to have a very, very salty meal. Any thoughts on where I think the problems might be? Oh, I also should mention that I injected the brine and put the pork in a bag in the rest in the fridge. Thanks for any thoughts.

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The brine from Ad Hoc is approximately 12.5% salt. That is very salty. Keller's tenderloin recipe, for instance, says do not brine more than 4 hours or it will be too salty. By overnight, I am guessing that means 20 or so hours?

Cooking by time on a grill is not a good way to cook. Everything changes each time you cook, so going by temperature (or feel, with experience) is better. The heat source could be hotter or cooler, the ambient temperature matters a lot, the meat will not be the same each time, etc. A thermometer will be your friend.

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ThanksTtogull. With my first taste I assumed too long for the brine. As for time, etc i have relied on a very lazy timing approach which may have caught up to me. I guess a thermopen will have to be in my future. After a long commuting day I can really go for the "oh, that looks like 4mins per side" approach.

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Even if one has no other need in life for spreadsheets (count yourself lucky if this is the case!), spreadsheets are unbeatable for adjusting bread recipes, and adjusting brines.

Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand spells out how to compute brines. The simplest approach is to ignore the meat, ignore the math, and use lots of liquid. Then one adjusts salt by brine time. For example, a half cup of salt and less sugar per gallon of water is a "light brine" in the barbecue world (where the "three Rs" refer to cuts of meat). Four hours is nice for salmon or chicken, but longer can be too salty.

Next up, one adds the weight of the meat to the weight of the water, and computes the amount of salt to add as a percentage. (Work in grams!) Here the idea is that the salt concentration will be the same in equilibrium in the meat and water, so one can leave the brine overnight or for days and it will come out just right.

Treating the meat as no water, or all water, are both approximations that are clearly wrong. The truth is somewhere in between. One can guess at the bone weight (or learn, weighing both parts each time one bones) and multiply the meat by some fraction to estimate its water content. Say, 60% or 80%, depends on the cut.

Any such approach if followed consistently will self correct small errors. Your idea of the ideal salt concentration may be off from reality, but will still work for you if you adjust it to taste. The more liquid you use, the smaller any errors will be. Exactly the same thing happens in bread baking, where some people won't take into account their levain hydration in figuring their bread hydration. They can still get wonderful results as they adjust their target hydration over time, this just interferes with communicating with others.

I like 2.5% salt, counting the water in bone-in pork loins as 70%. This is a very light ham, which I find preferable to either "brined" or "not brined". I then cook it in the yard oven with smoke from apple wood, cooked just to the point guests will find acceptable. I separate the bone, leaving lots of meat on, and cook it longer, like ribs.

Per la strada incontro un passero che disse "Fratello cane, perche sei cosi triste?"

Ripose il cane: "Ho fame e non ho nulla da mangiare."

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The point above is good. And about that 12.5% (blush) - there were two errors on my part, and the salt is about 8% of the water weight. Still pretty salty. Some would put the brined pork in fresh water for a couple of hours, changing water every 30 minutes, to draw the excess salt from the outer part of the meat. But this is not what you would want to do after a long commute. Better to follow the advice above.

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