Sodium to Salt % Calculator - For Brining, Soups and Recipes

on
Savory food tastes best between 1-2% salinity. This tool helps you calculate how much salt / salt substitute to use in your marinade / recipe.





Use this to calculate how much salt substitute (soy sauce, miso, etc) to use in an equilibrium brine, to achieve your target salt percentage.

Calculations use a ratio of 23:58.4 as a ratio of sodium to sodium chloride. It assumes all the sodium comes from sodium chloride (table salt), and will be inaccurate if your ingredients included MSG (which contains sodium)

Assuming you will brine for a long time, 2% brines are recommended for meats, 1% for fish.
Having a 5-6% salt percentage in the brine is considered the most efficient for short brines. If you brine your meats in a resealable bag, you can achieve both.

I prefer to use soy sauce or fish sauce for my brines, or to flavor my soups, for extra flavor. This will also use for other salt substitutes, like miso or oyster sauce. Calculations maybe off, if there is added MSG in your sauce. 

ADVANCED USERS
Scroll down to use up to 4 different sauces, and input the % ratios you want to use for the sauces. Two calculations are given, one based on salinity, and the other based on weight. 

Another feature is to top up the salinity of a recipe. If your recipe already has  "𝑥" amount of one salt substitute, how much of another salt substitute do you need to add to get to your desired salinity level. 

________________________________________________________________________________

OTHER COMPOUNDS / INGREDIENTS FOR YOUR MARINADE

Tenderizing Compounds 
Acids: Acetic / Lactic / Tannic / Citric / Malic etc etc - mild (3.5pH) acids tenderize meat, strong (<3ph) acids may toughen.

Alkaline: Baking soda - stops meat proteins from bonding properly when heated, inhibits meat from getting tough and dry. 

Enzymes (protease): Onions / Papaya / Kiwi / Ginger / Figs / shio koji - some fruit/ veg /mold have enzymes have the effect of tenderizing meat. Soy sauce and miso also retain the enzymes from the koji molds, and bring some glutamates to flavor your food. 
Ginger is used in traditional chinese cooking to remove gamey flavors from meat. I use miso instead of salt to season my burgers. 





___________________________________________________________________________________

USEFUL GUIDES / FURTHER READING ON BRINES AND MARINADES
  • Mediterranean sea water is the equivalent of 3.8% salt. (Please keep your pasta water between 0.5% and 2%....sea water is too salty for pasta)
  • Blood Plasma is 0.9% (that's the same as salt water diluted to 1 part in 4) 
  • Cookies and cake range from 0.75-1.25%
  • Bread needs 1.8% - 2% (please tell me what salt substitute you are using for bread, and how it turns out!) 
  • Meats are usually be salted with 2% salt, seafood 1% as seafood has its own salt. 
  • Growth of Salmonella is inhibited at 3-4% salt , but botulism needs more, so always marinate in the fridge
  • Pepper and herbs (especially mint family, e.g. rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, sage and marjoram, and the myrtle family, which includes cloves and allspice) have anti-carcinogenic properties when used to marinate meat. 

  • More research needed
  • One theory (much more research needed) seems to indicate that small, light molecules penetrate better into food (
    • The molar masses some molecules are: 
      • Sodium chloride: 58.44 g mol−1
      • acetic acid 60.052 g mol−1
      • Eugenol: 164.20 g/mol
      • MSG 169.111 g/mol
      • Hydroxy-alpha sanshool (from szechuan peppercorns) 263.381  g/mol
      • Capsaicin: 305.41 g mol, 
      • Sucrose: 342.30 g/mol, 
      • Red dye 40: 496.42 g mol

  • Prof Blonder at at Genuineideas has a great post about salt diffusion. 
    • Salt takes 24 hours to penetrate 1 inch of raw meat (but cooking seems to drive salt ions further into the meat) 
      • In an hour of brining, salt penetrates only a few mm, but
      • The ions stored in the first few mm's act as a reservoir that diffuses faster during cooking, pushing salt deeper into the meat. So a half hour brine is often fine.
      • This is also why "dry brining" works- most of the diffusion happens in the oven, not the bucket.
      • After a 1 hour brine and a few hours of cooking, the bulk of the salt has moved inward about 3/4"- enough time to fully flavorize a 1 1/2" thick chicken breast or a bacon slab.
      • A 24 hr brine only doubles these distances. 
  • Genuineideas has more about brines, including sugar brines
  • Amazingribs also has several experiments on marinades and salt brines
  • Chefsteps has an awesome write up on equilibrium brines
  • Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine also has a great explanation. 




Key to the excel. 


Comments

Post a Comment