Science clarifies the dispute between meat tigers: with or without salt in advance – it does not matter!

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Should you salt the steak before or after cooking? It’s a question even celebrity chefs are divided on. Some, like French celebrity chef Jean-François Piège, believe that salt softens the meat fibers before roasting them. For others, including Joël Robuchon, who is also a star chef, this is perversion as it dries out the meat. What is true now?

Basically no one is right. At least that’s the conclusion science has come to.

Flavor researcher Hervé This conducted experiments in the 2000s by looking at strips of meat under a scanning electron microscope. His conclusion: “We didn’t see any more salt in salted ribeye before frying or in unsalted ribeye.”

Russian doll

To understand what’s going on in a frying pan, you need to look at how muscle is formed: Muscle is made up of a series of fiber bundles surrounded by protein tissue called collagen. This semi-permeable membrane greatly limits the penetration of salt into the meat.

In a sirloin, salt penetrates the fibers when they are cut diagonally. Again, this won’t work on a flank steak where the fibers are firm. In short: the salt thing also depends on what you want to fry.

According to author Arthur Le Caisne, it takes 60 to 90 minutes for salt to penetrate one millimeter of meat where the fibers are intact. For meat with cross-cut fibers, it takes 30 to 60 minutes. Salting a few minutes before frying has no effect: the salt remains mainly on the surface, in small cracks in the crust, but does not penetrate the meat. Then you can salt it directly on the plate.

Another argument against this is that salt draws juice from meat. This is called osmosis and serves to equalize salt concentrations between the inside and outside of muscle fibers. The water extracted this way tends to dissolve the salt during cooking – all of which evaporates in the pan or on the embers.

Take your time

But you shouldn’t completely ban saltiness because there are exceptions. Soft meat and fish have very little collagen, so the bundles don’t hold together and break apart and crack during cooking. Salting before frying under these conditions allows the brine you have created to return to the essence of the meat by capillary action.

But if you give the salt some time for the meat to absorb, it’s entirely possible to get an effect before cooking.

For a veal cutlet, you need about 1 percent of the weight of the meat with fine salt. Sprinkle and massage the cut meat and let it rest for 24 hours in a cool place by placing it on the wire rack (unwrapped) on a tray or plate. This is important so that the meat does not stay in its own juices.

Source : Blick