How To Brine Food For Smoking
Brining food is an essential part of the first stage of the smoking process in part to dehydrate the food and also in some cases to add flavor. It used to be all about food preservation but nowadays many will keep their brine recipes top secret because they will contain all sorts of ingredients including salt, sugar and molasses.
The prime ingredient is of course salt and that one thing to ensure is that your salt is non iodized because iodized salt can taint the food with a metallic flavor. Many will argue that kosher salt is the one to use and it's certainly worth it but so long as your salt is non iodized then this is good enough.
Just as with the salt it's important that your brine tub is non metallic. In old days the tub would have been made out of wood but today it's perfectly acceptable to use a plastic tub.
If you ever go to a commercial smoking plant you'll see that the brine gets used over and over again with the addition of extra salt after each brining session to replace the salt that has left with the last food batch. You can apply this same principle as a home smoker but I find that the amounts of food that I smoke are small and unless the brine is being used daily it's best to throw it away and start a new batch because the brine is a great home for bacteria. Also never brine meat in a brine that has had fish in it, the flavor will be tainted.
The next thing to think about is the concentration of the brine and certainly in the case of cold smoking fish it's preferable to use a fairly strong concentration of brine of around 80%. You can use a salinometer to measure the concentration or you can use brine tables but the easy method is to dissolve 1.2kg (2lb 10¾oz) in 4.54 litres (1 gallon) of water. I tend to use this strength of brine most of the time when making a salt brine simply because the fish is brined for a matter of hours rather than days and I find it most convenient.
You will however find that many smoker enthusiasts will talk about brining a turkey or other meats for a matter of days and this is absolutely the case if you're using a weaker brine and one that has the addition of sugar and other flavorings. The reason for adding sugar to a brine is that sugar relaxes the muscles and therefore tenderizes the meat.
If you've got a quality turkey then arguably the need to tenderize will be minimal so maybe the turkey brine is more about adding flavor but where the sugar brine really comes into its own is with tough meat such as brisket and you can use this method when making pastrami for example.
To finish off there's a couple of tips for you to follow.
1.If brining fish in a strong brine, (a smoked salmon brine for example) make sure that the fish are not packed too tightly otherwise the brine won't be able to work its magic
2.When using a weaker brine, make sure that it has been chilled to approx 1.5°C before the meat is immersed and then kept at this temperature throughout the brining process. This is simply to prevent spoilage as a normal refrigerator because a bring is not a substitute.
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