meat, it’s actually got a fairly complex structure. In their
whole form, muscle fibers resemble thick bundles of
telephone cables, where each individual wire inside the
bundle is a single juice-filled strand (known as a fibril)
constructed of proteins. Chop up these cable bundles, as
you do when you grind meat, and you end up with a whole
bunch of shorter bundles. Shorter, but still intact: the protein
strands are still held tightly within.
When salt is applied to the meat, at first some of the juices
contained within the muscle fibrils are drawn out through
the process of osmosis. That’s the tendency for a solution to
travel across a permeable membrane in the direction of
lower solute concentration to higher concentration
(translation: when there’s lot of salt outside of a meat cell
and not much inside, water from within the cell will travel
out to try and even out the concentration of solutes on the
outside and inside). The salt then dissolves in these juices,
creating a briny liquid. Certain meat proteins, namely
myosin, will partially dissolve in the presence of this brine.
nandana
(Nandana)
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