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Pressure and vacuum marination does not work (2016)
- jmilloy 3y agoIf you don't think about it, vacuum marination is appealing: let's try to squeeze the marinade into the meat! This article is about why that doesn't work. What is missing is a basic explanation of how marinating or brining does work, which should be at the beginning. Even the green-dye test is missing the obvious case where you marinade for say 24 hours. For one, I think brining and marinating is more than just tasty molecules diffusing into the meat. Informally, the proteins will dissolve or denature in the brine over time. It should be obvious, then, that the vacuum has no impact on this chemical process, but also that this dye test doesn't show anything about this process either. Second, and I want to know more about this if it's not correct, my understanding is that the salty brine or marinade actually draws water out of the meat at first as due to osmosis trying to achieve equilibrium. Then, the salty marinade is drawn back into the meat, again trending towards equilibrium. It's not just a simple process of random diffusion as this article suggests, but osmosis across a gradient. And osmosis actually does occur faster with higher pressure, but just not enough to matter here. I'm also curious if salt helps the dye at all.
- stevenwoo 3y agoJ. Kenji López-Alt documents trying a bunch of different methods/liquids/lengths of time of marinating in The Food Lab book and it just doesn't do much of anything IIRC.
- tptacek 3y agoThe green dye experiment, from the same site: https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/dye.html https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/dye.html ... supporting the logic that marination is mostly a surface treatment, and thus there's not that much point in waiting a full day to marinate something, but rather just enough time for the marinade to "penetrate" the surface layer that's as far as it's going anyways. Which is why, for instance, if you read a Kenji recipe, it's going to suggest marinating for "at least 30 minutes".
- jmilloy 3y agoOh cool, thanks for the full dye link. I think it may be that brining in an adequate salt solution is sufficiently different from this kind of surface marination.
- jmilloy 3y agoActually, I thought about this some more, and if marinating for 30 minutes is sufficient to basically maximize or saturate the surface penetration, then comparing the vacuum to no vacuum at 1 hour is pointless. Better to compare at say 5 or 10 minutes.
- bambax 3y agoYes, the marinade doesn't go very far beyond the surface; and that's why one should increase the surface by making many small pieces out of one big steak (or breast, etc.) It won't change the total marinating time but the result is going to be more interesting.
- nsxwolf 3y agoThis is why kabobs are so good.
- stickfigure 3y agoThere are a couple more options. Shopper's Corner (a boutique market in Santa Cruz) has the most amazing marinated meats I've ever tasted, and their trick is that they run them overnight in a vacuum tumbler. Presumably a regular tumbler would have the same effect. When I lived there, one of my favorites was a teriyaki ribeye. It was obvious from color that the marination fully penetrated the meat - steaks have striations and tumbling opens them up. So you can get a lot more surface area mechanically. There's also the option of "mechanical tenderization" - basically poking a zillion holes.
- bambax 3y ago> poking a zillion holes Yes, I have something like this https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_SL1500_1400x.jpg https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_S... But I've found that making bite-sized morsels is much simpler.
- akerl_ 3y agoWhy would osmosis overcorrect one way and then invert, absent some additional external force?
- jmilloy 3y agoGreat question. There's an explanation here. It sounds like this only applies to dry brining, in other words, a wet brine or salty marinade would skip the first stage. Dry-brining cuts out the unnecessary added water by using the natural moisture content of the meat to create a concentrated brine that, when given enough time, is naturally absorbed back into the meat before cooking. Season a steak with kosher salt, and within a few minutes, you will witness osmosis at work: Liquid from the steak will bead up on the surface of the meat, drawn out by the salt. Wait another ten minutes, and that liquid from the beef will have started to dissolve the salt, forming a concentrated brine https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine
- SamBam 3y agoYeah, I've never really night that explanation even with a dry brine. With a dry brine it's still going to draw water out to equilibrium. There's no real reason it would overshoot. Mixing with the salt and becoming a wet brine will still mean it's much saltier than the inside, and so won't draw back inside.
- throwawaylinux 3y agoMomentum? Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms?
- Timon3 3y ago"Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms" sounds like the title of an amazing 80s SciFi novel dealing with the fleeting nature of life amidst a group of chefs who let themselves not be stopped by the laws of nature in pursuit of new, better food experiences.
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- wodenokoto 3y agoWell, you could argue the pressure/vacuum would suck the marinate deeper into the meat, thus starting the process deeper inside the tissue causing a more deep and even marination. Just playing devils advocate. I really don’t know how this works.
- jmilloy 3y agoThe tests show that this isn't what happens though.
- hurril 3y agoThe vacuum is outside the meat, though, so if anything it's bound to suck whatever is in the meat out of it.
- thomasfedb 3y agoThis is pretty much exactly what the article says doesn’t work
- xvedejas 3y agoAir pressure can have effects on chemical processes, at least when some kind of phase transition may occur between liquid and gaseous phases. I don't think that's happening here, but the vacuum could have some negligible effect on, say, drying out the meat (evaporation is faster at lower pressures)
- thomasfedb 3y agoIf we want to be particularly pedantic (and apparently I do)… the process you mention - evaporation - is better classified as a physical process (inter-molecular forces) rather than a chemical process (molecular bonds).
- xvedejas 3y agoAh yeah, I didn't mean evaporation was a chemical process, it was something in addition to that. Aside from evaporation, there are chemical processes which (for example) generate gases, which is not a phase change but a change to form a different molecule that is gaseous at the given conditions. The cool thing is that the rate of such reactions is usually dependent on the pressure.
- javajosh 3y agoI always thought it would be interesting to a) live on a boat and b) use the water for various things. Cooling computers. Cooling beer. But also marinading things at high pressure. You could use a long stick to push a ziploc bag down, or use a weight and a pulley system. I don't care what a rando internet article says: the experiment must be done!
- ballenf 3y agoAnd for excitement, you might catch a shark with your lure.
- hansvm 3y agoThe "weight" solution is the way to go. A long stick is hard to store and has all sorts of forces acting on it in the wrong direction. Tacking a payload onto the spare anchor isn't unheard of, and if you need more depth then a weight on a leaded line is fine. If you leave it out with a buoy, use more rope than you think you need to not lose it in a current. The pulley is just a nicety if you're not hauling in a bunch of steel; the water displacement makes it so anyone in good shape can haul in a couple thousand pounds of fish by hand. Also, salt water corrodes basically everything. Good stainless isn't too badly affected. Bronze is better. You'd want to make sure a cooling system like that didn't have a stray charge buildup.
- whatshisface 3y agoIt makes zero sense that vacuum or pressure would drive marination into our out of the meat when it should almost instantly equilibrate with the external pressure (because it's not a rigid vessel.)
- adamcharnock 3y agoMy (inexpert) thought is that it would actually be the releasing of the vacuum that would drive the marinade into the meat. Which makes me wonder: does the rate of pressure release make a difference? How about repeating the process several times? Hum.
- OJFord 3y ago> How about repeating the process several times? No idea if it does help, but that is exactly what the 'marination mode' on chamber vacuum sealers does. (And also disables the sealing bar.)
- OJFord 3y agoToo late to edit but just to expand on that - I think there's a tendency (see TFA, comments here) to jump to meat as soon as anyone says 'marination', but the article doesn't actually say it doesn't work full stop. If anything the marshmallow experiment kind of implies marinating marshmallows (for example) would work well. People use the same method (bowl in a vacuum chamber repeatedly negatively pressurised and released, not a sealed bag) to (supposedly) speed up (immersion, not fermentation) pickling.
- kunwon1 3y agoYour comment about pickling reminded me of something novel I saw recently - fast-pickling with whipped cream chargers. I haven't tested this, but the claim is that the high pressure drastically accelerates the pickling process (I believe the example I saw was a ten minute cucumber pickle)
- ineedasername 3y agoWell, it seems more like the standard food vacuum isn’t strong enough, not necessarily that vacuum marination in general can’t work: The one used in the article was half an atmosphere. On the other hand, a pressure cooker goes up to a full atmosphere, and in half an hour can produce meat that tastes like it was marinated for a day or two. Yes, the heat helps here too, but that’s not enough on it’s own: boil a piece of meat in something like beef broth for that long and you don’t get a result anywhere near the pressure cooker, not at all. So pressure can absolutely make a difference, just not the low end food-saver countertop versions used for simple preservation and storage of food.
- duskwuff 3y ago> Yes, the heat helps here too, but that’s not enough on it’s own It absolutely is. Biochemical reactions run exponentially faster as temperature increases. In most cooking, the limiting factor on cooking speed is that water (and, thus, any food that contains water) can't be heated beyond 100°C without boiling away, so the food never exceeds that temperature. Pressure cooking breaks that limit by using pressure to raise the boiling point.
- jaktet 3y agoIs there a food safe cooking liquid that can heat beyond the boiling point of water?
- cycrutchfield 3y agoOil?
- jaktet 3y agoHa fair enough. I was just focused on heating being enough and not pressure and the only reason water gets to that point is pressure. Though I wonder if you can get the same result of a pressure cooker by submerging meat in oil heated to 250 degrees Fahrenheit
- deafpolygon 3y agoAs a (former) professional cook - I knew this, but it's nice to see the science behind it.
- Terr_ 3y agoIANACulinaryPhysicist, but if the main mechanism is boring old slow diffusion, that supports the traditional advice of perforating the meat, creating additional distributed sites for the marinade to work its magic.
- BlueThoughts 3y agoOn the AmazingRibs forums lead by 'Meathead' he pulls in science advisors to help with managing expectations with marination, salt, etc. Sometimes I inject meat with a salty brine. I only expect a fraction of the fluid to survive the cooking process.
- Snoozus 3y agoWould an ultrasonic cleaner speed up marination?
- OJFord 3y agoIt might help maintain a higher concentration brine, but I can't really imagine by what method it would aid penetration (of brine or anything)?
- netfortius 3y agoWithin the Instant Pot Pastrami recipe [1] (which - by the way - is the closest to getting the results of the 2nd Ave Deli or Katz's, in NYC), there is a *proper* recipe for brining (this one unrelated to the Instant Pot pressurizing!). Time of 6-7+ days (and flipping the meat daily, maybe less obvious), not pressure, is crucial. [1] https://pressureluckcooking.com/instant-pot-pastrami/ https://pressureluckcooking.com/instant-pot-pastrami/
- ycombinete 3y agoI’ve been making Salt/Corned Beef [0] since I visited London a few months back. It also requires a long brine cure. [0]https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/beef-recipes/homemade-salt-beef/ https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/beef-recipes/homemade-sa...
- _ph_ 3y agoWhile vaccuming might not have an effect in getting marination faster into the meat, I think it has quite an effect in getting the marinade efficiently onto the meat, as it does have the effect of distributing it nicely over the surface of the meat. Especially if you have like with ribs a very uneven surface. Which of course means that the marination happens well controlled.
- kunwon1 3y agoThat was one of my thoughts as well. I have a 'food saver' vacuum sealer and I use it frequently. It ensures that the marinade will fully envelop the meat, it keeps things clean, and I believe it mitigates oxidation.
- nicgrev 3y agoWould be good to do a taste test as I think 'marination' is about more than marinade penetration.
- londons_explore 3y agoIsn't the obvious approach to marinading to use a bed of needles to just inject the marinade in? Commercial meat processing does that (injecting salt water mostly to both preserve the meat and make it heavier so it sells for more money).
- ouid 3y ago[dead]