Page 57 - Barbecue Chicken Made Easy

Salt: The magic rock!
If you like your chicken juicy, tender, and flavorful, (and who doesn’t?) salting, also called brining, before you cook can improve it on all three fronts.
When meat cooks, a significant amount of water evaporates from the surface and some gets squeezed out from muscle fibers that contract when exposed to heat. This water is called drip loss or purge. Lean cuts like chicken breasts can dry out easily. How do you cook these cuts to safe temperatures without turning them into shoe leather? Surprisingly, salt can help because it helps protein glom onto water.
Researchers at Cooks Illustrated discovered that a chicken soaked in plain water and another soaked in a brine, a mix of salt and water, each gained about 6% by weight. They cooked both birds, as well as an unsoaked bird straight from the packaging. Weighed after cooking, the unsoaked chicken lost 18% of its original weight, while the chicken soaked it water lost 12% of its original weight, and the brined chicken lost 7% of its weight. Thus, brining counteracts one of the biggest problems of grilling by helping hold moisture near the surface, which almost always dries out by the time the center is properly cooked.
That’s because salt is the magic rock! Salt is only two atoms, sodium (Na) and Chloride (Cl) and when they get wet on the surface of the meat they get an electric charge, called ionization, and then they charge to the center of the meat
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There are four ways to brine: Wet brine, dry brine, brinerade, and injection. Here they all are defined.
protein retain water, and where it amplifies the natural flavors of
where salt helps the
the food without altering it