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How to Salt Your Steaks - Steak Experiments (Part 3)

May 30, 2021
welcome back to another episode of bbq bottles and today we will be doing another speaking experiment video which is a continuation of two previous videos we did on how to

salt

steak

. The first one was very popular and spawned a follow up video, there are a lot of questions in that video about does dry brine dry out

steak

, which ones are really better, so today we're going to do a 48 hour dry brine trip like googas and then season this one an hour before putting it on the grill, we'll show you the

salt

s we use, we'll measure the weights along the way so we can determine how much moisture, if any, is lost from the steak, and we'll give you our preference just right. in the end, so stick around if you want to know which of these methods is the best way to resolve

your

steak.
how to salt your steaks   steak experiments part 3
Well, to start, we went to our butcher and we have three

steaks

that are about the same size, these are an inch and a quarter thick and just to demonstrate that we're going to get out our tape measure here, you can see the quarter inch and a quarter and a quarter inch, this one maybe a little bit thinner, but they're all about the same size because we want to eliminate that element from the experiment. These are all rib eyes. These are beautiful grain fed rib eyes. You can see the veining along these. They have a really nice level of marbling, so in the salts. which we will use the salt we normally use is molten which is a flower of sel it is really beautiful and crystal clear this is a perfect finishing salt if we are going to do a traditional 48 hour dry brine this is what we will use if you are driving 24 hours and you can do the same thing, but these have very large crystals and those crystals, if you're seasoning a steak an hour before going on the grill, they won't have time. to completely melt and absorb into the fillet, which is why we will use our diamond crystal cultures.
how to salt your steaks   steak experiments part 3

More Interesting Facts About,

how to salt your steaks steak experiments part 3...

This is a much finer kosher crystal salt that will absorb very quickly and we just wanted to use the same salt on all three fillets to eliminate that. Now variable, how much salt are we going to use? We have our little scrap scale here, so this weighs about one hundred and seventy-eight grams, so what we're going to do is season this steak. Here we will weigh it again and see how much. salt we used and then we'll use the same round on the other two fillets again. We're just trying to eliminate variables in this experiment, so now we'll just take a pinch of salt and sprinkle it on. from nice and high so the salt spreads nice and evenly throughout the steak, cut it down, flip it over, we'll do the same thing on the other side, beautiful, now we're going to get the edges with whatever salt is left here, perfect, beautifully seasoned. above, we're just going to move this to the cooling rack, now we're going to weigh this on the scale again and we have one hundred and seventy-two grams, which means we used six grams of salt right now.
how to salt your steaks   steak experiments part 3
Weigh the steak itself and this will be our reference measurement to see if any moisture is lost during this process, so 513 grams, which is a little over a full pound, we'll make a note of this, so I'll pass them on to cutting board so we can vacuum seal them and we have this one on the cooling rack on top of the aluminum baking sheet. Now we are going to put it in the refrigerator for 48 hours. It's there right next to a monster rib that We have, we're going to do another one of those in the canal here very soon.
how to salt your steaks   steak experiments part 3
Okay, so we've got our little food saver machine here and then we're going to cut that bag open. Now we'll make a sealable bag here pretty quickly. Perfect. Now we'll stick our steak in here and vacuum seal the other side. Great, now we've got our vacuum sealed stakes here, we'll put them back in the fridge and that will see us back here in 24 hours to figure it out. the Mac Stick, so it's 24 hours later ready to start bringing our second stake here, but if you take a quick look at the first stake, you can see that it's an absolutely beautiful red color, the surface is already starting to dry, just look at that really impressive. of the salt has already been reabsorbed back into that stake now for the 24 hour dry brine, so we used 6 grams of salt in the last stake, so we're going to put our jar of salt back up here so that one hundred and seventy-one grams that means we have to get down to 165, so little by little we're going to take out some salt and season this steak until we get back down to 165.
I think you'll be very surprised by the result of this experiment, so stick around. with us all the way here okay, we'll season it, we'll flip it, get the other side here, perfect, there we go, now we're just going to take the edges and take what's left on the cutting board here, great, now I have almost all the salt in the steak, so now I'm just going to transfer this, so here on the scale it weighs 535 grams, so it's almost the same weight as the previous steak. We'll put it in the refrigerator. Rack and go, I'll put this back in the fridge and see the cook in 24 hours, so if you're looking for something to do while the

steaks

dry, consider hitting the light button.
It's a really easy way to support our channel, it helps with the YouTube algorithm, so if you just hit the like button a second time right below, we would really appreciate it. It's day 3, the best of days, because today we really have To grill these beauties, now we're going to salt our steak, which we're only going to season an hour before grilling, okay, let's take it out, so we use six grams of salt on these other stakes, so we'll do the same. Which here means that 159 grams is what we're looking to finish now. A really important point here is that while we use six grams of salt, you know that this is our salt preference.
If you don't like that much salt, then put about as much salt in these dry grounds as you want in

your

bar, there's nothing that says six grams is the right amount, it's the amount we use, so keep in mind that the salt you you're using for your dry brine is the seasoning for your steak you're grilling, so you don't need to add any more salt than this. We'll make sure to get all the extra salt in here with the edges of the steak as best we can, okay? We'll let this sit on the cooling rack here for an hour.
We take all of these steaks out an hour before they hit the grill so they can warm up to room temperature and that should help us get a nice even medium rare from edge to edge now we're going to wait on each of these steaks just to see how much moisture is left. lost during the dry brining process. Alright, first we're going to measure this steak here and that's 420 grams or fourteen point eight. ounces so one is a little lighter than the others, this bet here weighed 513 grams with the salt before the dry burning process began, so let's see how much weight it actually lost, that's 13 grams less than when we started with dry brine.
Process now just to give you an idea of ​​how much moisture representing the stakes or any muscle fiber to start with is about 70% moisture, which means in a 500 gram stake you have almost 350 grams of moisture that we've lost. grams pretty much nothing this is an interesting experiment for us now let's look at the 24 hour Bryant steak this guy weighs five hundred and twenty nine grams he started with 536 grams so we're actually dealing with seven grams so if I know which if you look at the amount of time it was in the refrigerator relative to the amount of moisture it lost, it's actually pretty close to this when it lost half the moisture, but now it was in the refrigerator half the time with these. guys everyone measured up let's wait an hour let them warm up to room temperature and then go to the grill now that we're outside it's time to fire up the Camaro you see here we're using the Big Green Egg charcoal. let's just fill the basket, you've got a really cool basket here and frankly I don't know how impressed I am with this Big Green Egg charcoal, it feels like the regular big block that comes out of the Joe charcoal that I get.
It's a little bit bigger and they feel like smaller chunks, so now to light this, we have the Burns O Matic Propane Lighter. Now that we have a couple of charcoal spots on here, we'll close the lid and have our vent set to grill at about 225 to 250. Okay, we're dialed in on our desired temperature of 225 here, so now we'll prepare the Kamado for the steaks, so the first few steps are just a little trick I've been working with here. recently and when I don't have any wood chunks, I just sprinkle on some of the hickory wood pellets from the trigger, so we just have our pellet grill, we sprinkle on some of those wood pellets and that will bring a nice rich smoky that hickory flavor for our cook.
Okay, next we'll put on the gloves. These gloves are absolutely amazing if you need to play with charcoal. If you are using the hot cast iron skillet. If you are dealing with logs. You can contact them to rate it super high. Now we will get you the slow roller system. You can already see the smoke from those paddles starting to come out here and then we'll install the actual grill. okay we've got our steaks where I need to go the grills boom hot look at that smoke it's a beautiful smoke we're set up here for indirect cooking so that's what we're going to do with a reverse sear on the end so we've got our steaks on, we have our 48 hour steak, our 24 and our 1 hour now for our temperatures, we're just going to set our great temperature here, we want to make sure even though we have the temperature on the hood that we're actually running at desired temperatures here now we're going to put our temperature probe in the fillet in the middle here and make sure it's nice and thick just so we can make sure we're monitoring the internal temperature from the middle of that fillet now close the lid and let it magic happens so the steaks have reached an internal temperature of 110 here, as you can see, so let's get the steaks.
We turn off and rest while we then heat up the grill to sear, look how beautiful those steaks look, just beautiful, they have a very nice red color due to the smoke from both the charcoal and the Hickory pellets that we put in here now with our glove. We'll just remove the tent probes here, now we'll transition our steak, we've got our 48 hours, our 24 hours, and of course our one hour early. Now to prepare the grill for searing, we will simply remove this piece, we have our slow cooker. Now we're going to go back to the grill grates, but what we're going to do is replace one of these wire grates with a cast iron grit.
Let's move this down one level too here just like that now. We're going to leave the lid here a little cracked just to make sure we have maximum airflow and really help power this up. It should take us about five to 10 minutes before it's really hot and ready to sear those steaks, so now we're going to place our steaks here on this cast iron rack and do the final sear. Now this browning here is just to give it a good crust, we'll try to get the internal temperature to 128 when we're. I'm done here so this won't take long, maybe 60 seconds each side and then we'll flip them over and hit them with the heat on the other side as well.
All right, we're going to turn these guys over here, forming a nice little crust. great, you can see the fat and the marbling diminishing, get some of that char, that burnt flavor, we really have that flame burning here, now, put this back on top, we don't want to singe them too much, so we'll just flip them over back and forth here a couple of times until we reach our internal of 128, leave them again, make sure they're good and even look, leave this aside here and check this way, all good, the best steak is done and ready to work, so it's this, give this steak here.
Oh, what a beautiful color and look, just look at that, okay, it's ready, we're ready to go in, okay, we've got these bad boys inside the fight, you know what we'd do. What we're normally doing now is just putting in a tablespoon of compound butter, but since we're just trying to isolate the flavor difference associated with the brining method, we won't do that here, but will put a link in the description. next if you want to see our compound butter recipe, just put a little quart or a couple of quarts of that compound butter in here and it will melt during that ten minute resting period;
It's going to be absolutely beautiful instead of what we're going to do, we're going to weigh these fillets. I want to see how much moisture we actually lost during the cooking process. We're going to start with our 48 hour dry brine, so that's four hundred and thirty-four grams, there were five of us. one hundred three grams after coming out of the refrigerator of that 48 hour brine, so we've lost a lot now we're going to continue with the 24 hour dry brine which is four fifty one and now the hour before the steak thatis at 371 So doing the math here, this is actually a little surprising, so the 48 hour dry brine we lost about 13 percent of its mass, which would have been all the moisture during cooking during the dry brine out of 24 hours, we lost about fifteen and then over the previous hour we lost about 12, so it's actually a pretty interesting result and what I would say is that the main takeaway is that this is all just a rounding error.
I mean, the percentages are so close that there's no way the brining process would actually produce anything. It kind of makes a difference in how wet or moist or juicy your steak is, so it's been sitting for 10 minutes. Now it's time to cut, so we have our 48 hour steak, 24 hour steak, and our one hour steak. What we're going to do is just make a small cross section. each of these and we'll do a little comparison there and man you can smell the fact that we use a charcoal grill here as you know we've been grilling a lot of steaks and cast iron and I can't. wait to bite into this char okay this is the biggest surprise for me if we look at the 48 hour dry brined steak the gray band is quite large it gets a little smaller with the 24 hour dry brine and it's almost non-existent. with steak we brine it an hour before cooking, that's absolutely amazing if anyone knows the science behind it.
I'd love to hear it in the comments below. This is absolutely a surprise to me. Let's cut this to see if. there's a difference in flavor but it's an incredible difference just in terms of uniformity and that wall to wall medium rare is a mistake okay we've got them cut up and you can see here it's really good even medium rare. all the steaks is really the level of that big man that exists here and to be honest, I wouldn't be disappointed if any of these steaks were the only steak that came off the grill, so we're talking about the differences that exist. margin here, but first let's get into this steak here, our salty steak mmm, that's really good, you can taste the salt, you can taste the char and the smokiness that came through that char in the hickory pellets, a really steak well, not too much. a lot of a real crunch from the crust but a really really nice flavor profile now for the 24 hour trip right oh that's so good we're so into this bet.
I will say that there really isn't much difference in the flavor profile, you may get a little more crunch and bite with the crust and that's simply because it was a drier surface when it hit the grill and so Therefore, more heat could go into forming the crust and we saw that at the beginning. which our salty steak didn't have as good a crust as the others, but now let's jump into the 48 hour hauling trip. I've got a big chunk here, the spinal came off, pop that first, alright folks, then. That about sums it up here, so in this taste test I'm going to give the winner to the steak that we brined an hour before, maybe it's a tie with the 24 hour dry brine, but when we look at the whole package I think the dry brine brined that lasted 24 to 48 hours had a slightly better crust, the best doneness was definitely for the steak that was only salted an hour before and the flavor profile was pretty indistinguishable in each of the three steaks, so You know what, friends, if you don't have time to brine the fillets for more than 1 hour, you will get an amazing result and in fact, I was very surprised by the result of this experiment, so if you like this experiment, let a comment.
Next consider subscribing to the channel because we have many more stick

experiments

coming up and we have a playlist here of all the steak

experiments

we've done so far. We have over 20 if you want to share them a check there well thanks for tuning in

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