Rescues · TO BRINE
Texture is spongy, wet and faintly ham-like.
Why it happens
Over-brined in a wet brine. Past a point the protein structure breaks down and the meat takes on a cured texture rather than a roasted one.
Recovering it
Over-salted meat cannot be un-salted, but it can be diluted at the plate — serve it with something starchy and unsalted, and cut the seasoning everywhere else in the dish. A wet-brined piece that will not brown can be dried hard with paper and left uncovered in the refrigerator for an hour, which usually recovers enough surface dryness for a crust. Under-brined is the easy one: salt now, and accept that it seasons the surface rather than the interior.
The mechanism
Salt dissolves in the meat's surface moisture and diffuses inward, where it does two things. It disrupts the structure of the muscle proteins so they cannot contract as tightly when heated — and since it is that contraction that wrings water out, a salted piece of meat expels measurably less. It also lets those proteins hold more water than they otherwise would. A wet brine adds water as well as salt, which raises weight but dilutes flavour; a dry brine adds only salt, draws moisture out briefly, then reabsorbs it as concentrated seasoned liquid, and leaves the surface dry — which is what allows a crust. That is why dry brining uncovered in the refrigerator does two jobs at once. Diffusion is slow, roughly a centimetre a day, so this is a technique that rewards planning rather than intensity.
The full TO BRINE lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.