Around the end of the year, one topic you see a lot of if you follow food on the interwebs is food trends. Everyone likes to predict what’s going to be the hot ingredient, what restaurant concepts will catch fire, or what general eating trend will take hold. I’ve already seen a few posts on this, and there are sure to be a few more. Check out the , Grub Street, or R&I Trends to see what I mean.
I’m not going to pretend I have some amazing insight into these trends, though there is one cooking preparation that I’ve heard a lot about this year – brining. While this may have been on the “hot trends of 2001” list somewhere, for whatever reason, I’ve seen brining mentioned a ton this year, particularly the last few weeks in regards to brining turkeys.
We brined our Thanksgiving turkey for the first time this year, and it was awesome. Turkey is notoriously dry, but man, this bird was tender, well seasoned, and juicy. Easily the best I’ve ever hard. I don’t think it was a coincidence.
I brined both the pork belly confit and the fried chicken from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook a few weeks ago, and both came out wonderfully. If I had to come up with a “personal food trend” for 2010, I think mine is going to be brining. Any white meat, which is generally cooked to a higher temperature than red meat, is going to benefit from brining, as the moisture and salt content is going to remain higher than it would otherwise.
I won’t regurgitate the science of what’s going on when you brine, but I suggest you read the on the subject, and there is some similarly useful information on the Cooking for Engineer’s website. I found it all very interesting, and I’ve decided that in many cases you are doing your food and yourself a disservice if you don’t brine.
Here are a few brine tips I’ve come up with:
- Do cook your brine (heat it up), but be sure to chill it completely before you add the meat
- Taste your brine before you add the meat. You don’t want it to be too salty. If it’s too salty to taste, it’s too salty for the meat.
- Play around with the brine time – a few hours may not be enough, but over twelve hours, your food may taste too salty. If you want to brine for a long time, like if you are going to put it in brine while you go to work, go easy on the salt.
- Fresh herbs impart great flavor. Cilantro is one of my favorites.
- The lemon used in the ad hoc fried chicken made the brine smell awesome. I really think this helped with the flavor.
- Let your food air dry for at least 30 minutes after taking it of the brine. This will help create a more crisp exterior.
If you didn’t brine your turkey this year, be sure to give it a try next time. One last brine link – here’s a , which is from a speaking series he did at Google a few weeks ago.
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As usual, we drank some fun wine with Thanksgiving this year. We tried a lot of wines that weren’t necessarily stars, but were interesting to try, particularly the older California wines. A few of them didn’t develop well with age, but the ‘96 Kunde Merlot held up well, and had a nice transition of flavors on the back end. The Liberty School tasted as fresh as a recent bottling, and while not even an above average wine to me, I was impressed with how well it was showing considering it’s age and pedigree.
It can be a crap shoot with older wines, but it’s fun to see how they come along with time, and to me, that’s the fun of trying aged wines.
With the turkey we tried a dry Riesling from Sass, and I also had an off-dry German Riesling. The sweeter German Riesling overpowered the turkey a bit, especially in contrast to the dry Sass, but it showed incredibly well, with a complex punch in the mouth of tropical fruit, a strong edge of minerality, and a super long finish. I credit Hardy of Dirty South Wine with introducing me to great Rieslings, and if you aren’t on-board yet, you really need to open yourself up to the variety, consistent quality, age-worthiness, and overall deliciousness of Alsace and German Riesling.
