Brining Meat that has been Frozen?


 
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Sean Flanagan

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I'm wondering if there's any real point to brining meat that has been frozen? The reason I say this is because as a relatively long time ham maker I know that you cannot make ham from meat that has been frozen. The freezing process really changes the structure of the meat, and it will not absorb the brine afterward. Does the same apply to dunking chicken that's been frozen in brine? I'm completely new to brining for BBQ, and I'm trying it for the first time today. The chicken has been frozen though, so I guess I want to take the results in the light of that fact, if it makes a difference. (Chicken should be ready in an hour or so...)
 
Sean,
I smoke alot of turkeys and brine every one of them. I always buy the cheap "Giant Food" brand turkeys that are always frozen. I have never had a problem and the turkeys turn out great. Be careful though, you do not want to brine a turkey that has a high sodium "solution" already in it (Butterball). You will have a product after brining that will be too salty to eat. Good luck
 
Hmmmm... brining is usually done to put moisture into meat that might otherwise dry out during cooking, usually used with low-fat content meats like poultry, pork loin, etc. Brisket and butt have plenty of fat in the meat, so don't need brining for that purpose.

That said, I HAVE heard of people brining butts, although I've never done it.

Personally, I can't see any reason to brine a brisket short of making corned beef or pastrami. Just my opinion, though...

Keri C, smokin' on Tulsa Time
 
Well the chicken turned out okay, but not great. We could taste the salty sweet (which was nice), but only on the surface really. I don't think the brine penetrated the meat much, if anything it just dried it out. It was noticeably drier than it ever has been before. Maybe I made the brine too strong, although I thought I made it weeker than the guides on TVWB. I might have gotten confused with all the types of salt mentioned though (I just used plain cooking salt).

I don't think I really understand the science of brining in this way... when you brine a ham it adds salt to the meat while removing a lot of moisture. I can't see why the same wouldn't apply here, unless the brine was quite weak, weaker than the solution in the cells. As such I might try a very weak brine next time. Hopefully something akin to crisping vegetables, but I'll be "plumping meat". LOL I might also try leaving out the sugar, to reduce the solution strength. Either that or I'll just inject the brine, which we've had several successes with. I suspect it would have been different if the meat hadn't been frozen too. I guess it's all a learning process!
 
The difference between ham and poultry is that, with ham, you're curing-- you're attempting to preserve the meat. With poultry and brining, you're adding moisture and flavor to the meat by a process most consider osmotic.
 
Unfortunately osmosis must pull moisture from the meat if the brine is a stronger solution than the cell contents. As the solution strength of cells is quite low, most any brine would be stronger than the cell contents. An isotonic salt solution would hardly be called a brine, it would have to be, like, less than 1% salt or something like that. Therefore the concept of adding moisture doesn't really make sense (to me at least). It certainly added flavor in my first attempt, but definately did not add moisture. Not that I won't try again!
 
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Sean Flanagan:
Therefore the concept of adding moisture doesn't really make sense (to me at least). <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
I've tried to discuss this in the All About Brining article. There are different views on how brining actually works. Although it may not actually add moisture to meat, it may help meat to hold on to more moisture during cooking versus unbrined meat.

Regards,
Chris
 
I have been buying fresh, never frozen chickens and turkeys. In both I find no comparison to their frosty counterparts.

Turkey breast from the Grandma's or Mom's frozen butterball was always dry as desert sand to be choked down with plenty of salt and gravy. I buy them fresh, cook them hot breast down and they are juicy and tender as can be (yes, even the turkey breast).

I've cooked a few fresh chickens in my WSM around 300F to 160F in the breast. Cut into them and clear juice runs all over the pan.

How do you know the brining didn't really work or dried out the chicken even more? Did you not brine some of *that* chicken, cook it identically then compare the two?

I said all of that to suggest this: freezing is hard on poultry, making the cooked product tougher and drier (compared to fresh). The brining you did may have helped, your chicken might have been worse if you hadn't.


Cheers
 
Do you brine your birds though? We very often get the same pieces from the same store, freeze them, and always get the same results when cooking them. This time they were significantly drier than any other time, which of course could be a freak batch of dry chicken, but is much more likely to be the one thing I did different this time (brining). Next time I'll try to do them fresh though, although that can be inconvenient depending on when we shop and when we want to eat them. But if others are getting chicken full of delectable juice from brining, then I want to too!

Actually I've been thinking about this, next time I might get a pack of homogenous pieces and organize it as an experiment. Do X pieces in brine, X pieces soaked in purified water, and X pieces au naturale. I'll even weigh the pieces out of the pack, after treatment, and after cooking. That way I should be able to get some kind of objective, quantitative result. The results should educate me at least, and others can take my findings with a grain of salt, in a little water of course. LOL
 
No, I haven't brined poltry (did some salmon), but I want to try a smoked turkey and I was going to brine it as per TVWB reference cooks (intrigued by the maple brine). Now I'm not so sure. I've marinated chickens/chicken chunks and I've always found them to be dry. Maybe it's just me. I like them fairly plain and cooked as I indicated previously. Looking forward to your updates.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Actually I've been thinking about this... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Sean,

Maybe this will save you some time.

From Cook's Illustrated, Jan/Feb 2004, pg 11:

----------------

Many have attributed the added juiciness of brined chicken to osmosis--the flow of water across a barrier from a place with a higher water concentration (the brine) to a place with a lower one (the chicken). I decided to test this explanation. If osmosis is in fact the source of the added juiciness of brined meat, I reasoned, then a bucket of pure unsalted water should add moisture at least as well as a brine, because water alone has the highest water concentration possible: 100 percent.

After soaking one chicken in brine and another in water for the same amount of time, I found that both had gained moisture, about 6 percent by weight. Satisfied that osmosis was indeed the force driving the addition of moisture to meat during brining, I roasted the two birds, along with a third straight out of the package. I would soon discover that osmosis was not the only reason why brined meat cooked up juicy.

During roasting, the chicken taken straight from the package lost 18 percent of its original weight, and the chicken soaked in water lost 12 percent of its presoak weight. Remarkably, the brined bird shed only a mere 7 percent of its starting weight. Looking at my test results, I realized that the benefit of brining could not be explained by osmosis alone. Salt, too, was playing a crucial role by aiding in the retention of water.

Table salt is made up of two ions, sodium and chloride, that are oppositely charged. Proteins, such as those in meat, are large molecules that contain a mosaic of charges, negative and positive. When proteins are placed in a solution containing salt, they readjust their shape to accommodate the opposing charges. This rearrangement of the protein molecules compromises the structural integrity of the meat, reducing it overall toughness. It also creates gaps that fill up with water. The added salt makes the water less likely to evaporate during cooking, and the result is meat that is both juicy and tender.

John Olson, Science Editor
 
He's gone and beaten me to it! Still, I think I'll do the experiment myself as well. I'm not happy with the osmosis theory, as it doesn't make sense. Not unless people are making hypotonic brine solutions. That's the only way osmosis would work, and obviously that's not what people are doing. There's also the aberation that both the brine and pure water added 6% of weight to the bird. There should be SOME difference...

I'm curious about doing this with chicken pieces as well, and experiencing the difference between the three. We went shopping last night, so I picked up a pack of drumsticks just for this purpose. I won't freeze them, and I'll be more careful with brine concentration this time too.
 
Sean,
Here's a link to a very clear explanation of how brining works. As far as I can tell, osmosis has no play here at all.

The author of the article is the food scientist that Alton Brown has on his show "Good Eats". She is a real hoot !!!

Al

Brining
 
Thanks Al, I'm really hoping that using fresh (never frozen) chicken might be the answer. I hope I'm not off the mark by using chicken pieces either, as I notice so far everyone refers to whole birds. Should be tomorrow, as we'll be having a WSM smoke-cooked ham tonight. :)

I'm going through a phase of trying some new things: this ham will be from a raw pickled pork from the supermarket. Our local grocery store has started to offer a wide range of cured but uncooked meats. Seems like a cheap and easy option, so I'm going to try them out. I might try the lamb ham next!
 
I always brine chicken pieces before cooking. It doesn't seem to matter much if they're fresh or frozen. Most times I pop em in the brine still frozen.
They always come out much jucier with the brining than without it. I do try to take them off the heat as soon as they're done otherwise they can still dry out pretty quickly even with the magic brine.

Lamb Ham... I'm not too sure on that one.

Al
 
<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Al Silverman:
Here's a link to a very clear explanation of how brining works... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
This is the problem I faced when writing the All About Brining article. You can find different food scientists who offer different explanations of how brining works, some citing osmosis, others not. So when I wrote the article, I just discussed all the theories I could find and acknowledged that in the end, it's not so important how it works--just that it definitely results in meat that is more flavorful and somewhat more moist.

Regards,
Chris
 
Al, how about "corned mutton" does that sound better than "lamb ham" :) I notice the Australian Weber BBQ cookbook has it in it, but I've never seen it till now. Never even tried it, but I've tried just about everything the supermarket offers now except for that and some kind of corned tongue, and I'm just not keen on that...

Chris, thanks for the effort on the pages, I must admit I didn't read them in depth but skimmed them a little, mostly looking for the brine concentrations and whether frozen makes a difference. I'm sure I'm either unlucky, or did something wrong. Either way it's the results of only my first attempt, hopefully the results of the second will be better. Not that the first was bad, as added salt always improves the flavour in my book. ;-)
 
Sean,
I have eaten lot's of pickled tongue. Believe it or not, you will find it in evety Deli in New York or Boston.
It's really pretty good. I will admit though, it's not a very appetizing sight to see a huge tongue sitting on a platter!!!!!

Al
 
I performed my little chicken brining experiment, but got the same results. The brined chicken did not gain weight, but the chicken soaked in water did gain a very small amount. I felt the chicken that was soaked in water was the juiciest, while the brined was the driest, with the chicken left as is somewhere in between. My wife could tell no real difference except that she liked the salt in the brined piece (she's on a low salt diet, so she'll take salt any way she can get it!). They were definitely all moister than my first attempt with the frozen chicken.

I think the crux of my problem is the way I cook the chicken pieces. I remember seeing (I think in the article Al posted) a comment about over-cooking causing brined meat to dry out. I usually smother our chicken pieces with BBQ sauce and then cook them for hours, until the BBQ sauce is reduced to a thick glaze and the meat falls off the bone. I think perhaps in this case brining is a bad idea, at least for us.
 
Hmmm, I usually find that brined poultry gives a little more leeway if not removed from the heat precisely at 160-161* as far as a moist white meat result goes. I think, as you observed, brining is of most benefit when roasting, and not sort-of stewing in BBQ sauce.
 
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