Steak Experiments - Should You Dry Brine Your Steaks (S1.E5)

welcome back everybody to another episode of steak experiments on barbecue and bottles so last week and we'll put a link to the video up here in the corner we test it out when's the perfect time to season your steak you seize it season it two hours before you put it in the pan immediately before or after you're finished searing in the pan but now we're gonna take a little twist on that and we're gonna try and season the steaks with salt two days before our cook now this is essentially a dry brine and it's supposed to allow the salt to really fully absorb into the steak break some of those tissues down make your steak that much more tender so we're gonna take two of these sirloins here one of them we're gonna do a dry brine set up I'll show you how to do that and the other one we're just gonna we'll season two hours before the cook which is the winner of last week's video and we'll see which one's the better outcome so stick around [Music] [Applause] so if you're enjoying this series where we're testing out a bunch of different variables to figure out how to cook the perfect steak and cast-iron make sure you subscribe below for more videos to come we've got about a dozen different things we're gonna be testing and we'll be releasing a new video every week now let's get to the dry brine so here we've got some sirloins we've just got some triple-a grade beef pick this up POSCO now what you're gonna want to do is put your steak on it on a cooling rack just like this put it over top of a cookie sheet and this is really just so as any moisture comes out of the steak you don't want it dripping onto your in your fridge so this is like you know just a collection system for that now you just want to generously sprinkle a little bit of salt all over your steak and here we're just using a coarse kosher salt I'm gonna make sure you get all the sides as well perfect rub it in a little bit or Pat it down with your hand and now we're just gonna pop this in the fridge and we're about two-and-a-half days before our cook so we're gonna see how this plays out the idea here is really not only as as I mentioned the salt absorbs in the mistake breaks down some of the muscular tissue and so it's that much more tender but it's also really gonna help to dry out the surface of the steak so that when we put it in the cast-iron pan there's no wasted energy going to evaporate the water or moisture off the steak we're gonna get all of that energy going straight into the steak we're gonna get the amino acids just really hitting with the heat and caramelizing to get a really great Byard effect so I'm just gonna put this in the fridge we're not covering it or anything like that and come check back in two days so we've had these in the fridge for a little over two days now and we put one for the steaks alongside the two salted steaks that where we did the dry brine we just put a regular steak down here straight out of the package and I think there's a couple really interesting observations here just to see the difference in the colors between these two steaks you've got this one over here that's gone extremely red the steak that we didn't brine at all even the fat and the marbling in it it's almost like it's absorbed some of the the the juices are blood within the steak the dry brined ones they've browned a little bit so there's some oxidization that's occurred but they've maintained more of their original color so that's first interesting observation the second one is to the touch these are extremely dry and I'm really excited to see how these turn out in cast iron so for seasoning all we're gonna do we're gonna salt and pepper this one and given how dry the steak is you really want to Pat this in just to make sure you don't lose the sneezing when you when you flip it over and do the other side and now for these steaks of course we've already done the salt so we're just going to pepper them [Music] perfect now we're just gonna let these sit for another hour to two hours let them warm up to room temperature and then we're gonna hit them with the cast iron so while we're waiting for the pan to heat up here just want to tell you a quick story so one of our religious followers here who's watched virtually all our videos Craig he said you know what why don't you guys rebrand the steak journey video to Mythbusters since that's kind of what we're doing so let us know in the comments below if you like that idea but anyway big shadow to Craig for the suggestion all right now let's check if the pans warmed out so you need your pan to be north of 400 degrees Fahrenheit we've got it at almost 600 here so this is just absolutely screaming hot so now we're gonna use some avocado oil as opposed to olive oil it's got a higher smoke point so let's get this avocado oil in here pick up your plan make sure you get a nice even layer along the bottom of the pan and now we're gonna drop in our states so here we're gonna take the two sirloins that look the most similar in size and shape perfect so we've got the front one here this is the one that we didn't actually do the dry brine on it just sat on the drying rack for two days the one in the back this is the one that we had the dry brine action on so let's see what difference this makes so these have been in the pan here for about four minutes so we're gonna do a flip oh just look at that crust [Music] check that crust out there too both of those are beautiful I'm going to add some butter here we've got about two minutes left in this cook get that around all the slides we're gonna add some rosemary here just rough it up a little bit before we drop it in and of course we'd be remiss if we didn't add some garlic so for the garlic you just got close here smash it down with her chef's knife just like that and we're gonna add it into the pan just like this now we're just going to give these a quick pacing here make sure you get some of that garlic on to the steak this butters just gonna add some great flavor now we're just gonna check the temp here with an instant-read thermometer we're looking for just under 130 we're at 126 left probably got another couple seconds to go this stake show me at 115 so we'll give that one a little while longer so let's pull this first one and just look at that crust so we're just gonna check the temperature of this one here right now we're at 131 128 129 so this is ready to come off so we're just gonna put a little bit of compound butter on these while we're resting and we'll check back in in 10 minutes so we've got these steaks they've been resting for 10 minutes this is the one that we just had sitting out for two days this is the one we had out for two days with the dry brine first the appearance on both of these is absolutely incredible these are easily the best crusts we've ever got on this Jake steak journey so far so I'm gonna say just leaving your steaks out on a drying rack for two days whether you're salted or not is gonna massively improve the crust on your steak so that's a huge plus so now let's cut into these we're gonna check out the tenderness and taste [Music] all right folks so I'll take a piece here from the middle of each check them out got nice medium-rare frankly in both cases so now for the ultimate test the taste test mmm you can really taste the crunch of the crust as you bite through on these the butter the garlic nice and tender really good really pleased with that outcome so now let's try the dry brine steak mmm it's got the same crunch the same flavor a seasoning very similar but it's even more tender than the state that didn't have the driver iron on it that's incredible that salt clearly is working its way down into the steak relaxing some of those muscles and really improving the tenderness of this outcome here so I'm gonna give the win here to dry brining if you've got the time two days before salt your steaks put them on a drying rack leave them in your fridge so if you liked this video give us a like below subscribe to this channel we've got a few more of these tests coming up so make sure you don't miss out stick around thanks for tuning in

Channel: BBQ and Bottles

Views: 135,915

Rating: 4.8751559 out of 5

Keywords: BBQ and Bottles, BBQandBottles, dry brine steak, dry brining steak, How to dry brine steak, 48 hour dry brine, how to brine steak, 24 hour dry brine steak, 48 hour dry brine steak, Steak Experiment, dry brining steak in fridge, how to dry brine steak fridge, how to dry brine steak guga, how to dry brine steak guga foods

Id: y-mktLc6Vpc

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 17 2018