Free Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor by Hervé This Page B

question: How much juice comes out of
    the meat in the presence of salt? Drench pieces of red and white meat in table
    salt and let them sit, weighing them at regular intervals. The results probably
    will vary depending on the meat selected, which may have been cut along the
    axis of the fibers (with the grain), perpendicularly (against the grain), or diago-
    nally (across the grain). Naturally, water will drain out more readily if the fibers
    have been opened up. In the case of the red meat, the type of steak matters, too.
    For example, a rib steak ought to lose more than a flank steak.
    With flank steak we find that the discharge of water is very slow, whereas
    white meat such as chicken loses 1% of its weight in the first thirty minutes
    after salting. Of course, what happens to salted meats left to sit at room tem-
    perature is very different from what occurs during cooking, but the results
    are plain enough: There is no disgorging of liquid, even though the meat has
    been coated with salt. In the case of actual cooking, when one would season
    it with only a small amount of salt, the purging action would be weaker still.
    Thus it appears that salt has no notable effect—a provisional but nonetheless
    probable conclusion. You can salt your flank steak when you like, without fear
    of its drying out.
    Turning to the second question, whether the salt penetrates the steak dur-
    ing cooking, consider the experiments I have conducted in collaboration with
    Rolande Ollitrault of the École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie in Paris and
    Seasoning Steak | 51
    Marie-Paule Pardo and Éric Trochon of the École Supérieure de Cuisine Fran-
    çaise. We salted the same cut of meat before and after cooking, measuring the
    loss of juice and, most importantly, analyzing the pieces of cooked meat with
    a scanning electron microscope and a device for detecting chemical elements
    by means of X-rays.
    X-ray analysis reveals the presence of various chemical elements (notably
    sodium and chlorine in the case of kitchen salt), making it possible to deter-
    mine whether the salt diffuses through the meat. Again, the answer is clear:
    Rather than penetrating to the center, it actually passes out of the meat during
    cooking. On the other hand, when a piece of meat that has been trimmed of
    fat is placed on the grill, a very small amount of metal is observed to enter the
    outer layer of the meat.
    The nature of meats is so varied that the more subtle effects of preparation
    and cooking may make themselves felt only insofar as they suit our desires
    and answer to our illusions. “Nature,” in the sybilline words of Leonardo da
    Vinci (anticipating Hamlet), “is full of infinite reasons that were never in ex-
    perience.” This does not mean that experimentation must be abandoned. It
    means that experiments must be carefully designed so that the fire of truth
    may be discovered beneath the smoke of subjective experience and individual
    opinion.
    52 | secrets of the kitchen
    11
    Wine and Marinades
    Beef marinates better in red wine than in white wine.
    i t i s s a i d t h a t f i s h m u s t b e c o o k e d in white wine but that red wine
    should be used to marinate and cook tough meats in order to tenderize them.
    It is also said that parsley must not be used if the marinating process lasts
    more than two days and that one should not roast marinated meats because
    roasting dries them out. How far should we credit these familiar dictums?
    Japanese physical chemists recently provided partial corroboration. Experi-
    ments conducted some twenty years ago in France, at the Institut National
    de la Recherche Agronomique station in Clermont-Ferrand, showed that beef
    is tenderized by prolonged immersion in acid solutions, which dissolve col-
    lagen and various other proteins principally responsible for the toughness of
    raw meats while ionizing these proteins, increasing the amount of water they
    retain. Vinegar is not the sole ingredient of such