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

welcome back to another episode of barbecue bottles and today we're gonna be doing another speak experiment video that's a follow up to two previous videos we've done on how to salt your steak the first of those was really popular and it led to a follow up video there are lots of questions in that video around whether dry brining dries out your steak which ones actually better so today we're gonna be doing a 48-hour Drive ride a 24 hour dry brine just like googas and then we'll season this one an hour before we put it on the grill we're gonna show you the salts we use we're gonna measure the weights along the way just so we can determine how much moisture if any is lost out of the steak and we'll give you our preference right at the end so stick around if you want to know which of these methods is the best way to solve your steak okay to start with we've gone to our butcher and we've got three steaks that are roughly the same size these are an inch and a quarter thick and just to prove that we're gonna get out our tape measure here you can see into the quarter inch and a quarter inch and a quarter this one's maybe a touch thinner but they're all roughly 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 marbling all the way through these just a really really nice level of marbling so onto the salts that we're gonna be using the salt that we normally use is meld on which is a fleur de sel it's really really beautiful and crystally this is a perfect finishing salt if we're gonna be doing a traditional 48-hour dry brine this is what we'll use if you're doing a 24 hour drive and you can do the same but these have really large crystals in them and those crystals if you're seasoning a steak an hour before you hit the grill won't have time to fully melt and absorb into the steak so because of that we're gonna use our diamond crystal cultures this is a much finer kosher crystal salt that will absorb really quickly and we just wanted to use the same salt across all three steaks to eliminate that variable now how much salt are we gonna use we've got our little waste scale here so this weighs about a hundred and seventy eight grams so what we're gonna do is season up this steak here we'll weigh it again see how much salt that we used and then we'll use the same of an assault on the other two steaks again we're just trying to eliminate variables in this experiment so now we're just gonna take a pinch of salt and sprinkle it on go in from nice and high so that that salt diffuses nice and evenly throughout your steak cut that down flip it over we'll do the same on the other side beautiful now we're gonna get the edges with whatever salt is left over here perfect beautifully seasoned up we're just gonna move this over to the cooling rack now we're gonna weigh this on the scale again and we've got a hundred and seventy two grams so that means we used six grams of salt right now we're gonna weigh the steak itself and this is gonna be our baseline measurement to see if there's any moisture that's lost through this process so 513 grams that's a little over a full pound we'll take note of this so I'm just gonna move these off to the cutting board so we can vacuum seal those and we've got this one on the cooling rack over top of the aluminum baking tray now let's get this into the fridge for 48 hours it's in there right next to a monster prime rib that we've got we're gonna do another one of those on the channel here pretty soon alright so we've got our little food saver machine here and then we'll cut off that bag now we'll make a sealable bag here pretty quickly [Applause] perfect now we'll get our steak in here and we'll vac seal up the other side [Music] great now we got our vac sealed stakes here we're gonna get these back in the fridge and that will see you back here in 24 hours to solve the Mac stick so it's 24 hours later ready to start brining our second stake here but just quickly taking a look at the first stake you can see it's just an absolutely beautiful red color the surface is already starting to dry just look at that really stunning all of the salt has already reabsorbed back into that stake now for the 24 hour dry brine so we use 6 grams of salt on the last stake so we're just gonna put our salt jar here back on top so a hundred and seventy-one grams that means we need to get down to 165 so we're just gonna slowly take out some salt and season this steak until we're back down to 165 now I think you're gonna be really surprised with the outcome on this experiment so stick with us right through the end here all right we'll get that seasoned up turn it over get the other side here perfect there we go now we're just gonna get the edges and take up what's left on the cutting board here great now we've got almost all the salt on the steak so now I'm just gonna transfer this so this is coming in at 535 grams here on the scale so this is almost the same weight as the previous steak we'll get this onto the cooling rack and we're good to go now I'll put this back in the fridge and we'll see in 24 hours for the cook so if you're looking for something to do while your steaks are drying consider smashing the light button it's a really easy way to support our Channel it helps with the YouTube algorithm so if you guys just take a second smash that like button right down below we'd really appreciate it all right it's day 3 the best of the days because today we actually get to grill these beauties up now we're gonna salt our steak that we're just gonna be seasoning an hour before we grill ok let's take out alright so we used six grams of salt on these other stakes so we're gonna do the same thing here which means 159 grams is what we're looking to finish with now a really important point here is while we're using six grams of salt you know this is our salt preference if you don't like this much salt then put as much salt in these dry grinds as as you want on your stick there's nothing that says six grams is the right amount it's just however much we use so please keep that in mind the salt that you're using for your dry brine is the seasoning for your steak you go on the grill so you don't need to add any more salt to it than this we'll make sure that we get all the extra salt here with the edges of the steak to the best we can okay now we're gonna let this rest on the cooling rack here for an hour we've got all of these steaks out an hour before they're gonna hit the grill so that they can warm up to room temperature and that should just help us get a nice even medium-rare from edge to edge now we're gonna wait each of these steaks just to see how much moisture was lost through the dry brining process all right we're gonna measure this steak here first [Music] and that's 420 grams or fourteen point eight ounces so that one is a little bit lighter than the other stakes this stake here this was 513 grams with the salt before the dry burning process started so let's see just how much weight that actually lost that's 13 grams less than when we started the dry brine process now just to give you a sense of how much moisture that represents stakes or any muscle fibers to begin with are about 70% moisture so that means on a 500 gram stake you've got almost 350 grams worth of moisture we've lost 13 grams practically nothing this is an interesting experiment for us now let's check out the 24-hour Bryant steak this guy is weighing in at five hundred and twenty nine grams this started off at 536 grams so we're really dealing with seven grams so if you know if you look at the amount of time that it was in the fridge relative to the amount of moisture that it's lost it's actually pretty close to this when it lost half of the moisture but it was in the fridge half of the time now with these guys all measured up we're gonna wait an hour let these warm up to room temp and then head out to the grill now we're outside time to fire up the Camaro you'll see here we're using the Big Green Egg charcoal we're just gonna fill up 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 come out of Joe charcoal that I get is a little bit bigger and these just feel like smaller chunks so now to light this up we've got the Burns O Matic propane lighter now that we got a couple spots of charcoal ignited here we're gonna close down the lid and we'll get our vent set for grilling at about 225 to 250 all right we're dialed in at our desired temperature of 225 here so now to prep the Kamado for the steaks so the first steps just a little hack I've been working with here recently and when I don't have wood chunks I just sprinkle on a few of the hickory wood pellets from trigger so we just have our pellet grill we sprinkle on some of those wood pellets and that'll just bring a really nice rich smokiness that Hickory flavor to our cook all right next we're gonna get our gloves on here these gloves are absolutely incredible if you need to play around with your charcoal if you're using the hot cast-iron pan if you're dealing with fire logs you can just reach in touch them to rate it to a super high degree now we'll get them the slow roller system you can already see the smoke from those pallets starting to come through here and then we'll set up the actual grill grate itself all right we've got our steaks where I need to go the grills hot boom look at that smoke it's a beautiful smoke we're set up here for an indirect cook so that's what we're gonna do with a reverse sear at the end so we've got our steaks on we've got our 48 hour steak our 24 and our 1 hour now for our temps we're just gonna get our great temp here set up we want to make sure even though we've got the temp in the hood that we're actually running at our desired temps here now we'll put our temp probe into the steak in the middle here and we'll make sure that gets in nice and thick just so that we can make sure that we're monitoring the internal temp from the middle of that steak all right now close the lid down and let the magic happen so it steaks have just hit an internal temp of 110 here as you can see so we're gonna get the steaks off and resting while we then get the grill ripping hot for a sear look at how beautiful those steaks look just gorgeous have a really nice red color from that smoke both from the charcoal and the Hickory pellets that we put on here now with our glove we'll just pull the tent probes off here now get our steak transitioned off got our 48 hour our 24 hour and of course our one hour before now to get the grill set up of a sear we're just gonna remove this piece got our slow roller off here now we'll go back with the grill grates but what we're gonna do is replace one of these wire grates with a cast iron grit we're gonna move this down one level lower as well here just like that now we're gonna leave the lid here cracked a bit just to make sure we get maximum air flow and really help to ignite this it should take us about five to 10 minutes before this is ripping hot and just ready to sear those steaks so now we're gonna set our steaks down here on this cast iron grate and we'll do the final sear off now this sear here is just to give it a nice crust we're gonna try and bring the internal temp up to 128 when we're finished 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 gonna flip these guys over here nice little crust forming looking great you can see the fat and the marbling rendering down get a little bit of that char that burnt flavor we've really got that flame ripping hot here now now put this back over we don't want to singe these too badly so we'll just flip them back and forth here a couple times until we hit our internal of 128 let them over again make sure we're getting these nice and even just watch leave this off the side here and check this path all right the best steak is done and ready to go so it's this one give this steak here Oh such a beautiful color and look just look at that alright it's off we're ready to head inside okay we've got these bad boys inside the wresting know what we'd normally be doing right now is just putting on a dollop of compound butter but because we're just trying to isolate for the taste difference associated with the brining method we're not gonna do that here but we'll drop a link in the description below if you want to check out our compound butter recipe you just put a nice little quarter or a couple quarter sizes of that compound butter on here and it'll just melt over that ten minute rest period it'll be absolutely beautiful instead what we're gonna do we're gonna weigh these steaks I want to see how much moisture we actually lost over the cooking process we're gonna start off with our 48-hour dry brine so this is four hundred and thirty four grams we were five hundred and three grams after it came out of the fridge from that 48 hour brine so we've lost a lot now we're gonna go on with the 24 hour dry brine that's four fifty one and now the one hour before steak that's at 371 so doing the math here this is actually a little bit of a surprise so the 48 hour dry brine we lost about 13 percent of its mass which would have been all moisture through the cook for the 24 hour dry brine we lost about fifteen and then for the one hour before we lost about 12 so that's actually a pretty interesting result and what I'd say is the main conclusion is this is all just a rounding error here I mean the percentages are so close there's no way the brining process actually makes any kind of difference on how wet or moist or juicy your steak is so these have been resting for 10 minutes now is the time to cut in so we've got our 48 hour our 24 hour and our one-hour steak what we're gonna do is just do a little cross section across each of these and we'll just do a little comparison there and a man you can just smell the fact that we used a charcoal grill here as you know we've been doing a lot of searing of steaks and cast-iron and I cannot wait to bite into this charcoal all right this is the biggest surprise for me if we look at the 48 hour dry brine steak the grey band is fairly large it gets a little bit smaller with the 24 hour dry brine and it's next to non-existent with the steak do we brined an hour before the cook that is absolutely incredible if anybody knows the science behind this I'd love to hear about it in the comments below this is absolutely a shocker for me we're gonna cut this up see if there's a taste difference but that is an incredible difference just in terms of the evenness and that wall-to-wall medium-rare a mistake okay we've got these cut up and you can see here it's a really nice even medium-rare across all the steaks it's really just the level of that great man that exists here and to be honest I wouldn't be disappointed if any of these steaks were the only steak that I had coming off the grill so we are talking that differences that are on the margin here but let's go in with this steak here first the one our salted steak mmm that is really good you can taste the salt you can taste the charcoal and the smokiness that came up through that charcoal in the Hickory pellets really nice steak not too much of an actual crunch from the crust but really really nice flavor profile now for the 24 hour drive right oh that is so good we're so on this stake I'm gonna say there actually isn't that much of a difference in the taste profile you might get a little bit more crunch and bite with the crust and that's just because it was a drier surface when it hit the grill and so more that heat could actually go to forming the crust and we did see that at the start that the one our salt steak didn't have as good of a crust as the others but now we're gonna jump into the 48 hour drag ride I've got a great piece here the spinalis came off you pop that in first alright folks so that pretty much wraps it up here okay so on this taste test I'm gonna give the winner to the steak that we salted one hour before maybe it's a tie with the 24 hour dry brine but when we look through the whole package I think the dry brine steaks that went 24 to 48 hours had a slightly better crust the best doneness definitely went to the steak that only was salted an hour before and the taste profile it was pretty indistinguishable through each of the three steaks so you know what folks if you don't have time to do more than a 1-hour brining of your steaks you're gonna come out with an incredible outcome here and I was actually really surprised with the outcome on this this experiment so if you like this experiment leave a comment below consider subscribing to the channel because we've got loads more of these stick experiments to come and we've got a playlist over here of all the steak experiments we've done so far we've got over 20 if you want to give them a check there alright thanks for tuning in

Channel: BBQ and Bottles

Views: 76,147

Rating: 4.9229398 out of 5

Keywords: BBQ and Bottles, BBQandBottles

Id: zk4HLo9Ps3I

Length: 20min 10sec (1210 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020