If 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.
J. 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.
... 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".
Oh 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.
Actually, 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.
Yes, 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.
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.
Yeah, this is also explained in the book I can highly recommend: The Science of Cooking [0]. It has stuff like this and many more tricks and background. It’s absolutely pop-science, so don’t expect a dissertation, but it’s great for home cooks.
Great 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
Yeah, 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.
"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.
I don’t think it would work like a rubber band. However, given that proteins degrade during marination, there has to be a change in osmolality of the meat. This may or may not affect how moisture and flavour is drawn in.
I have my doubts about this, and also whether it is relevant that a pressure differential can increase the rate of osmosis.
If, as the author contends, meat can be regarded as a water-saturated matrix of proteins [1], then the pressure inside the meat will rise to match the external pressure. The only way for a pressure differential to form would be if the matrix formed a very rigid shell (even a slight flexibility would allow the pressure to equalize), but it does not.
Furthermore, because water is almost incompressible, this occurs without any appreciable change in volume. The author suggests that if the matrix compresses, then that will expel water, but this will only be the case if the voids in the matrix become smaller. It's more likely, I think, that the only change would be that the walls of the voids will become thinner, as the water inside the voids can follow the pressure increase without changing appreciably in volume: in effect, the water inside the voids supports them against the pressure outside.
All of this assumes the pressure is being applied equally in all directions, which is the case if you are applying the pressure to the marinade, rather than squeezing the meat in one direction.
[1] Or a cellulose matrix in the case of vegetables.
Well, 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.
Air 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)
If 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).
Ah 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.
I 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!
The "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.
It 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.)
My (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.
Too 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.
Your 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)
Well, 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.
> 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.
See my sibling answer: if you dip meat directly into oil at above 100°C (212°F), you will get something resembling leather, as the high temperature will make any water inside the meat boil and escape as vapor.
What you want is to coat the meat with something that prevents water from escaping: usually a tempura batter.
I'm wondering if any of you have cooked before. You don't allow the meat to reach 212F in any method of cooking. If you do then you get something resembling leather because you way overcooked the meat.
The only parts of the meat that get above 212 are the surfaces in direct contact with the heat source.
Yes. Deep frying is done at 170-190° C; but it dries the food because any water inside boils away. Drying can be good (such as in fries) but is usually very undesirable as it hardens meat.
That's why one coats nuggets in batter for example; batter turns into a hull and traps the water, preventing it from escaping the meat; and the cooking is fast and thorough because of the high temperature.
Consider for example deep fried meat. You can deep fry a steak and achieve even higher temperatures but the the oil will not pervade it nearly as much as the liquids around that same piece of meat in a pressure cooker. Instead the deep fried meat can become tough because the moisture boils and the oil is not forced into to provide a replacement
I heard a quote in an interview once from a michellin star chef:
Paraphrasing from memory:
"One of the best preserved secrets in haute-cuisine is that the best way to perfectly cook a steak/filet mignon is to deepfry it and then sear it in a pan at very high heat."
Haven't tried it, but I buy it. I would think the deepfrying is fast enough to avoid making the meat too dry. And I personally don't really find briney water oozing out of my steak to be all that sexy anyway.
Yes, the linked article called it myth based on usage of a 1/2 atmosphere food-saver vacuum. I responded that such pressure was too low, and higher pressure especially combined with heat worked very well, and I linked to UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences as a source to confirm this.
The linked article’s author showed that counter top food savers aren’t effective, but I’d trust the university’s food science department when it comes to the broader use of pressure in general, specifically when used with heat as in a pressure cooker, which uses significantly more pressure.
1 atmosphere is still basically nothing, due to the incompressiblity of meat. The article goes into this. It mentioned that high-pressure machines reach 10,000 atmospheres. That's a lot more that 1.
Rather, what that (comparatively) low pressure of a pressure cooker is doing is raising the temperature at which water will boil. So that means that the meat will become way hotter. Much hotter, in fact, than putting it in a scorching hot oven, because even in a hot oven the inside of the meat can only go above 100⁰C when the water inside boils away.
IANACulinaryPhysicist, 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.
Within 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.
While 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.
That 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.
66 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 94.1 ms ] threadWhat 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.
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".
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.
Yes, I have something like this
https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_S...
But I've found that making bite-sized morsels is much simpler.
[0]:https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19723027W/The_Science_of_Coo...
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
Edit: it's not the same plot at all but this reminded me of the short story, "The Nothing Spot" (1978): http://vintage.failed-dam.org/nothing.htm
I wish more browser apps had a reading mode
If, as the author contends, meat can be regarded as a water-saturated matrix of proteins [1], then the pressure inside the meat will rise to match the external pressure. The only way for a pressure differential to form would be if the matrix formed a very rigid shell (even a slight flexibility would allow the pressure to equalize), but it does not.
Furthermore, because water is almost incompressible, this occurs without any appreciable change in volume. The author suggests that if the matrix compresses, then that will expel water, but this will only be the case if the voids in the matrix become smaller. It's more likely, I think, that the only change would be that the walls of the voids will become thinner, as the water inside the voids can follow the pressure increase without changing appreciably in volume: in effect, the water inside the voids supports them against the pressure outside.
All of this assumes the pressure is being applied equally in all directions, which is the case if you are applying the pressure to the marinade, rather than squeezing the meat in one direction.
[1] Or a cellulose matrix in the case of vegetables.
Just playing devils advocate. I really don’t know how this works.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
What you want is to coat the meat with something that prevents water from escaping: usually a tempura batter.
The only parts of the meat that get above 212 are the surfaces in direct contact with the heat source.
I'm just saying that if you plunge it directly into oil at 180°C, that's what's going to happen.
Nobody does this for "cooking", but you can try to do it, as an experiment.
There's even a recipe for a chicken made in lava (actual volcano) and it doesn't go faster than a normal oven.
That's why one coats nuggets in batter for example; batter turns into a hull and traps the water, preventing it from escaping the meat; and the cooking is fast and thorough because of the high temperature.
Consider for example deep fried meat. You can deep fry a steak and achieve even higher temperatures but the the oil will not pervade it nearly as much as the liquids around that same piece of meat in a pressure cooker. Instead the deep fried meat can become tough because the moisture boils and the oil is not forced into to provide a replacement
Paraphrasing from memory:
"One of the best preserved secrets in haute-cuisine is that the best way to perfectly cook a steak/filet mignon is to deepfry it and then sear it in a pan at very high heat."
Haven't tried it, but I buy it. I would think the deepfrying is fast enough to avoid making the meat too dry. And I personally don't really find briney water oozing out of my steak to be all that sexy anyway.
https://kfcfryers.com/
That is the exact myth which is addressed by the article we're discussing.
The linked article’s author showed that counter top food savers aren’t effective, but I’d trust the university’s food science department when it comes to the broader use of pressure in general, specifically when used with heat as in a pressure cooker, which uses significantly more pressure.
Rather, what that (comparatively) low pressure of a pressure cooker is doing is raising the temperature at which water will boil. So that means that the meat will become way hotter. Much hotter, in fact, than putting it in a scorching hot oven, because even in a hot oven the inside of the meat can only go above 100⁰C when the water inside boils away.
Sometimes I inject meat with a salty brine. I only expect a fraction of the fluid to survive the cooking process.
[1] https://pressureluckcooking.com/instant-pot-pastrami/
[0]https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/beef-recipes/homemade-sa...
Commercial meat processing does that (injecting salt water mostly to both preserve the meat and make it heavier so it sells for more money).