Rubs and Brines and marinades
A lot will determine what you are cooking, if you are following a low sodium diet and how long you have.
Salt doesn’t enhance flavour of the food, it works by actually opening our tastebuds and reduces the bitter taste sensation while increasing the sweet and umami sensation – the things we like in food!
So we need to add some salt.
What you don’t want to do is brine your meat and then add a salty rub. There is a school of thought that brining does not work. From a chemistry perspective it does because diffusion occurs down the diffusion gradient. It is just painfully slow and will penetrate about 1cm into meat after about 8 hrs.
So this is good for things like pork steaks, chicken breasts, ribs and any fish. Lean meat.
A rub can be a mix of herbs, spices, sugar and salt, rubbed into the outside of the meat and all its nooks and crannies and then left and cooked on the grill.
A marinade is basically a wet rub! Add other ingredients such as mild vinegar, lemon or lime juice which help break down the muscle fibres and allow more of the flavour in. What you don’t want to do is add oil because meat is 80% water and oil and water don’t like each other, they don’t mix.
We have covered brines here (insert web link)
Rubs include:
Mix all the ingredients and cover your meat
