Oils in Injection Brining

[hainanchicken]

I've read in Modernist Cuisine and various other sources that injection brining is great because the salt is delivered straight to the interior of the chicken and can then diffuse faster.

 

I've also read that you can add oils and fat-soluble flavor molecules in the brine you're injecting. However, I thought that marinades are largely a surface treatment because while the sodium can diffuse into the meat, the fat-soluble flavor molecules are too large to diffuse through cell walls.

 

If that's the case, then why would injecting fat-soluble flavor molecules into a few interior spots work? Wouldn't the flavor molecules just clump up and not diffuse through the meat?

[pastrygirl]

Would injecting liquid fat essentially be the same as larding with a solid fat?  It won't necessarily diffuse evenly throughout the meat, but you still have little pockets of extra richness and flavor.  But then you'd want to be more even and thorough with injections for good distribution, rather than relying on osmosis.

[scubadoo97]

On August 7, 2018 at 2:06 PM, pastrygirl said:

Would injecting liquid fat essentially be the same as larding with a solid fat?  It won't necessarily diffuse evenly throughout the meat, but you still have little pockets of extra richness and flavor.  But then you'd want to be more even and thorough with injections for good distribution, rather than relying on osmosis.

I think that's where it's at.  Pockets of flavor infused oils.  Butter, aromatic oils etc.  

[btbyrd]

On 8/7/2018 at 1:20 AM, hainanchicken said:

If that's the case, then why would injecting fat soluble flavor molecules into a few interior spots work? Wouldn't the flavor molecules just clump up and not diffuse through the meat?

 

I think you may be underestimating how many injection sites there are when properly injection brining. The MC guidelines suggest that you should aim to distribute the shots so that there is no meat more than an inch from an injection site. It's more than just a few interior spots.

 

It's also not really the case that water soluble flavors penetrate meat while fat soluble ones don't. In general, most all flavor molecules are too large to penetrate protein more than a few millimeters. Salt has some ionic activity that will draw it much deeper inside, given enough time. But the idea that marinades are a "surface treatment" holds true regardless of whether the marinade's flavors are based in water or fat.

 

While I have done injection brining with a brining needle, my new method is to Jaccard whole muscle cuts and then seal them in a bag with marinade or brine using a chamber vacuum machine. The needling creates channels in the protein which are then flooded with liquid when the pressure comes back into the chamber. The bag and the atmosphere act as the "injector."