I bought one of those “Foodsaver” vacuum packers. I have one with an attachment to a container in which you can put something like steak or chicken, then marinade. Then you vacuum the whole thing and remove all the air. They claim that it’s 10 times faster than regular marinating.
I THINK it tastes a lot better, but what would be the science here? Is there air in meat that might be replaced by marinade?
Also, do you think removing all the air from, say, potato salad, would help it keep fresh longer? What’s the science there?
According to the promotional sites, vacuum sealing is supposed to preserve food longer by removing the oxygen microbes use to live (This, however, does nothing for anaerobic organisms, which happily continue in moist environments like, perhaps, potato salad). Vacuum sealing apparently forces marinade deeper into meat and fish due to pressure.
Yes, all the tiny pores and holes in an object, such as a steak, are filled with water and air. When you pull a vacuum on a steak the pressurized liquid comes out of the pores, leaving them empty and ready to be filled with yummy marinade. When you release the vacuum, any pores that haven’t yet been filled are subjected to marinade under ~15 psi pressure.
The vacuum packers suck the air out of a sealing bag, right?
If that’s so, then, it wouldn’t help to marinade out in the open on the International Space Station, because it’s the difference between the pressure being applied from the outside (due to the bag being surrounded by 14.7 PSI air) and the pressure inside the bag that causes this “forced marinading” to occur.
I’ve heard also that the non-presence of oxygenÑparticularly with garlic, for some reasonÑleads to some potentially very toxic results. But I think that only results when you pack it in oil and seal the lid.
So the general consensus here is that the Foodsaver (and its ilk) does do what its manufacturer claims it does?
Next question: is wine necessary for a good steak marinade (well, that could be another thread!=+)
Yesbut they also have rigid containers with special lids that allow you to suck the air out of the container and therefore out of the pores of the meat. In this scenario the ambient pressure doesn’t matter. Of course, if the ambient pressure extremely low then you don’t need the Food Saver machine; the pressure gradient will suck the air out of the container for you.
I have a Food Saver and I have not tried using it for marinading so I don’t know if this really works better. I think this may be a case of a product that does one thing really well (preserving foods longer) and then they try to think up all this other stuff you can do with it as selling points.
But if Squink’s theory is correct, the real benefits occur upon the re-pressurization of the container when the marinade is pressumably forced back into the carcks and crevices of the meat. If this is the case, you should only have to depressurize the container for a brief period of time to achieve the desired results…
Actually, you gain some benefit from leaving the stuff at low pressure for a while because it can take some time for the water and air to come out of the pores. Cycling three or four times between low pressure and normal pressure would get the most marinade into the meat in the shortest time.
I will say one thing on the Foodsaver claim: Cook’s Illustrated claims that “brining” —that is, immersing a food, such as chicken or shrimp into cold, salted water—makes for a better chicken or shrimp when cooked. I’ve tried it many times, and it’s an amazingly effective cooking improver.
Let me just say that I had tried this many times before I tried it with the Foodsaver—and ended up with chicken so salty it was almost inedible! This after only about two hours of vacuum “brining.”
So I guess some of the Foodsaver claims hold true.
True. Pressure difference is what it’s all about. You don’t need a vacuum. You just need higher pressure surrounding the meat bathing in marinade. For example, if you live near Duke University and have a friend at their hyperbaric chamber facility, take him a bowl of chicken covered in marinade sause of your choice & tell him to stick it (in the hyperbaric chamber, that is). Minutes later, your chicken will be fully flavor infused. For a good home remedy, search google for “pressure infusion marination” & read all about it. There’s a good youtube vid here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMQRSJUFuwM showing chicken strips marinated fully in 20-seconds flat.
Garlic can harbot botulism spores. Normally this isn’t a problem because our stomach acid is strong enough to kill the spores. But if you put the garlic in an anaerobic, low-acid environment (like oil) then the botulism can start to multiply and produce their deadly toxin. That’s why you should never make garlic oil at home unless you use it right away.
Marinades, unlike brines, generally don’t penetrate much into meat. there was a bit on Good Eats a while back where he showed a couple lamb shoulder chops marinated for different lengths of time, and when cut into raw there was no difference in appearance. Both had a thin outer layer of brown/gray but the interiors were unchanged.
I am not seeing how this works. Prior discussion was about reducing pressure to enhance a marinade. How does increasing pressure help? The reasoning behind reducing pressure (and I don’t know if it’s true scientifically) is that the release of ambient pressure allows the meat to expand, allowing liquid to more easily penetrate fibers. (I have seen some kinds of foods visibly expand when I put them in a vacuum cannister.) But increasing pressure would seem to have the opposite effect.
In this video, the guy takes two strips of chicken thin enough to fit through the top of a Pepsi bottle, and then coats them with teriyaki sauce. With such high surface area-to-volume ratio, I’d bet the results are indistinguishable from doing the same thing without pressurizing the bottle first.
Uh? Marinading, brining, and salting all have the same purpose: deliver flavor (typically salt) into the meat. What typically distinguishes a “brine” from a “marinade” is the addition of extra flavors and/or liquids. In all of these cases for certain meats (say, poultry and chicken), there’s no tenderizing going on, although you’ll end up with a juicier, more tender product. The illusion of tenderizing comes from the fact the salting process draws in and retains more water, and so there’s still more water when the item is cooked.
I’d never pour a sauce over my perfectly cooked, properly pre-salted rib-eye!
There are tenderizing agents available, but the brand names escape me (and I’ve never found a use for them). Made with some type of pineapple extract, I think.
Salt does more than add flavor. It changes the hydroscopic properties, and reacts with the meat by coagulating the protein, changing the texture and flavor. Acidic contents in marinades also breakdown the components of the meat. The addition of water is not just a matter of soaking, the salt causes the cells to hold more water internally. The pineapple stuff is an enzyme that further breaks down the tissue for tenderizing. I hate that stuff.
I love this aspect of the foodsaver, as well as the overall usefulness of the mason jar seal - keep herbs and spices and cereals and brown sugar and nuts…and the list goes on.