If you like your meat juicy, tender, and flavorful, there is one simple ingredient that can improve all three: Salt.
Salt, which is another name for the mineral sodium chloride (NaCl), is probably the oldest way to flavor food and essential to all living things. Our bodies require salt, and the only way to get it is to ingest it. All our bodily fluids, blood and tears, contain salt. Our nervous system requires salt to conduct electricity.
Salting and brining can significantly improve your cooking. Salt is unlike any spice and herb in the house physically and chemically, and it behaves in strange and wonderful ways when applied properly to food. Don’t overdo it and you have nothing to fear from salt. And when used judiciously it can seriously amplify flavor without changing it, and it can help protein hold onto moisture.
Here's what you need to know about table salt, kosher salt, pickling salt, sea salt, seasoned salt, curing salts, and how to use them. Learn also about brines, measuring different salts, and the health aspects of salt.
Achieve juicy, tender, and flavorful meat every time you hit the grill thanks to one simple ingredient: salt. Sprinkling salt on finished meats helps amplify the flavor on the surface but brining helps bring the benefits of salt to every bite. Here's how salting and brining can significantly improve your cooking.
Salt helps protein hang onto water during cooking so brining is a great technique to make food moist. But which is better, wet brining or dry brining? It all depends on which meat you're cooking and the results you want. Get the details.
Seasoned salt is easy to make and the large grains really add a spark to potatoes, pastas, pizza, veggies, and just about everything else that needs salt. By adding a variety of herbs, spices, and dried citrus you can create your own signature seasoned salt blend for adding a new depth of flavor to countless dishes.
Cooking on a salt block amps up flavor and makes a great presentation. You can put the salt block right on your grill, heat it up, and then cook on the salt block like a griddle. You can also bring a hot salt block to the table and sear meats tableside! Here's everything you need to know about cooking on salt blocks.
There are a number of meat injection gizmos on the market ranging from simple hypodermics to pumps. They all work, but some work better than others. Here are our reviews.
High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, we’ll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!
Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.
Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please don’t think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.
1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.
2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.
3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.
4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.
5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.
A big part of this site is our unbiased equipment and product reviews. We love playing with toys and we have no problem calling them the way we see them. Some companies pay a finder’s fee if a reader clicks a link on AmazingRibs.com and buys a product. It has zero impact on our reviews, zero impact on the price you pay, and the sites never tell us what you bought, but it has a major impact on our ability to keep this site alive! So before you buy, please click our links. Here’s a link that takes you to a page on Amazon that has some of our favorite tools and toys: https://tinyurl.com/amazingribs
Grilla Pellet Smoker proves good things come in small packages
Green Mountain’s portable Davy Crockett Pellet Smoker is one mean tailgating and picnic machine. But it’s also gaining popularity with people who want to add a small, set it and forget it pellet smoker to their backyard arsenal. And with their WiFi capabilities you can control and monitor Davy Crocket from your smart phone or laptop.
Comprehensive Temperature Magnet With 80+ Important Temps
Winner of the National BBQ Association’s product of the year award. This 8.5″ x 11″ magnet contains more that 80 benchmark temperatures for meats (both USDA recommended temps as well as the temps chefs recommend), fats and oils, sugars, sous vide, eggs, collagens, wood combustion, breads, and more. Although it is not certified as all-weather, we have tested it outdoors in Chicago weather and it has not delaminated in three years, but there is minor fading.
The Efficiency Of A Kamado Plus The Flexibility Of The Slow ‘N Sear Insert
Built around SnS Grill’s patented Slow ‘N Sear charcoal kettle accessory, this 22-inch kamado is a premium ceramic grill that brings true 2-zone cooking to a kamado.
The FireBoard Spark is a hybrid combining instant-read capability, a cabled temperature probe, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. We gave Spark a Platinum Medal for pushing the envelope of product capability while maintaining high standards of design and workmanship.
The amazing Karubecue is the most innovative smoker in the world. The quality of meat from this machine is astonishing. At its crux is a patented firebox that burns logs above the cooking chamber and sucks heat and extremely clean blue smoke into the thermostat controlled oven. It is our favorite smoker, period. Click here for our review of this superb smoker
Surely you know somebody who loves outdoor cooking who deserves a gift for the holidays, birthday, anniversary, or just for being wonderful. There he is, right in the mirror! Here are our selections of best ideas, all Platinum or Gold Medalists, listed by price.
High quality websites are expensive to run. If you help us, we’ll pay you back bigtime with an ad-free experience and a lot of freebies!
Millions come to AmazingRibs.com every month for high quality tested recipes, tips on technique, science, mythbusting, product reviews, and inspiration. But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us.
Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. But please don’t think of it as a donation. Members get MANY great benefits. We block all third-party ads, we give members free ebooks, magazines, interviews, webinars, more recipes, a monthly sweepstakes with prizes worth up to $2,000, discounts on products, and best of all a community of like-minded cooks free of flame wars. Click below to see all the benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive.
Post comments and questions below
1) Please try the search box at the top of every page before you ask for help.
2) Try to post your question to the appropriate page.
3) Tell us everything we need to know to help such as the type of cooker and thermometer. Dial thermometers are often off by as much as 50°F so if you are not using a good digital thermometer we probably can’t help you with time and temp questions. Please read this article about thermometers.
4) If you are a member of the Pitmaster Club, your comments login is probably different.
5) Posts with links in them may not appear immediately.
Moderators