I'm here at Roaming Rooster in DC.

This is Mike.

Mike does not know the difference between the two bits of chicken that are in this cooler.

It's a double-blind experiment.

Okay, let me tell you how we got here.

I strongly believe that brining chicken is just something that foodies do to show off.

I don't think that regular people could tell the difference between brined and unbrined chicken if it wasn't pointed out to them first.

- And unlike George, I actually know how to cook a piece of chicken, but I think it'll be funny if we have him research, write, and host an entire episode just to find out that he's wrong.

(upbeat music) - So, what evidence do I have to be making such bold statements?

Basically, just a lifetime of eating unbrined chicken and being very satisfied with it.

You know, I should probably just brine some chicken and see what happens.

(upbeat music) - Are you aware that George and I are having an argument?

We would love it if you could test this on your end.

- Ooh, yes!

- And then see if you still land on Team Brine/Team Andrew/correct, or if you're somehow tricked into thinking that George is right.

- I find it hard to believe that I would agree with George on anything, really, but especially on this.

- Okay, moment of truth.

First, the unbrined chicken.

It's a bit warm.

Okay, to me that tastes like chicken.

- Tastes bland and a little wet.

- It's chicken breast, so it doesn't taste very tender or particularly juicy.

Now, the brined chicken.

- This is a delightful piece of chicken.

Definitely got some salt.

Nice texture.

Yeah, it's a great piece of chicken.

- And already it was a little easier to push the fork in, so I may have to eat my hat, here.

It's definitely more tender, but it also tastes more like airplane chicken.

It almost tastes too tender.

- Way more juicy, way more tender, not even close.

George has no idea what he's talking about.

- I stand by my original assertion.

If you hadn't pointed out that there was gonna be a difference between those two pieces of chicken that I just ate, I wouldn't call it out on my own.

What we really need is a double-blind experiment.

Andrew, can you set that up?

- Fine.

- And while Andrew's doing most of the actual work, here, let me go see what the literature has to say about this.

Let's start by looking at changes you can see visually when you brine meat.

Now, these beautiful images were published in a 2018 paper that, when I read it, really pissed me off because I thought for sure that I would lose.

Anyway, this is a super-close-up picture of muscle tissue from the thigh of a Charolais cow.

The red circles are muscle cells in cross-section.

The colorless areas are spaces between cells.

Now, this photo is the control, no added salt.

This photo is the exact same perspective, but after the muscle had been brined in a 6% salt solution for five days.

By the way, five days is way longer than anyone recommends brining meat.

The authors did it this way just to make sure that brining time wasn't a factor.

Check out the description for more information on how long to brine, if you choose to do so, after watching the rest of this video.

Okay, back to this.

The cells have swelled so dramatically that they are now completely crowded together.

So, somehow, brining makes the cells swell up like crazy.

And since water is the only other ingredient in the brine, it's totally reasonable to look at this and think, okay, these cells must now be full of water.

And that surprised me.

Why?

I was expecting that a really concentrated salt solution, seven times-ish as concentrated as the cytoplasm of cells, would pull water out of the cells by osmosis, leaving shriveled, wrinkly cells depleted of their water.

But instead, we see plump and, dare I say it, juicy cells.

And this graph shows that not only does water enter cells, but salt does, too.

The more salt you put in the brine, the more salt ends up in the meat.

So, there might be some osmosis happening somewhere in here, but the dominant effect is clearly that both salt and water just diffuse into the meat.

And that's why my brined chicken breast pieces got heavier.

Now, if at this point you're thinking I made a stupid bet, hold onto your butts, 'cause there is way more.

Here is another set of images.

Same exact perspective, just a different way to visualize the fibers.

On the left, unbrined meat.

On the right, the five-day brined meat.

The blue color shows protein.

Anywhere that's blue is protein.

Anywhere that's white is not protein.

Now, notice how in the unbrined meat there's plenty of white space between the muscle cells, and in the brined meat, there is much less white space.

But also, what little space there is has turned blue, which suggests that the salt has somehow forced the proteins to leak out of cells.

That's pretty wild.

How is salt doing that?

To answer that question, we need to take a quick look at the structure of muscle fibers.

Now this is a super, super zoomed-in view.

Because we're not a biology channel, I'm not gonna explain everything.

All you need to know is that these thick filaments are made of many, many tightly-bound molecules of a protein called myosin.

And when the salt concentration gets high enough, for reasons that we actually don't fully understand, the thick myosin filaments break up into bazillions of individual myosin molecules.

Those individual molecules bind more water than the tightly-wound fiber did, so the muscle fibers swell up.

By the way, this whole process happens more readily at colder temperatures, which is why people recommend brining in the fridge, and also because you should not keep raw chicken at room temperature for hours.

That is a recipe for explosive dia— so not only do salt and water move into the meat, but the salt also denatures muscle proteins, causing them to leak out of cells and retain even more water.

All of this chemistry has a demonstrable, reproducible, and, dare I say it, scientifically proven effect on the meat.

Multiple papers going back to at least the 1960s show, and believe me, it hurts to say this, that brined meat, when subject to this guillotine-like apparatus that tests how much force it takes to cut through, brined meat requires much less force than unbrined meat.

So, am I screwed?

Maybe, but also maybe not.

Remember, my original hypothesis was not that brining does nothing.

It was that regular people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between brined and unbrined meat.

My thought here is that, yes, there are definitely chemical and physical changes that happen as a result of brining, but that most people are just not gonna notice those differences unless they are pointed out to you in a fancy restaurant, preferably by a waiter with a French accent.

Caca!

Now, this is where we leave the domain of chemistry and enter the domain of the brain.

I wanna show you two experimental results that I think play in my favor.

First, this one from Germany, in which the authors recruited 99 people to taste-test four different waters, Evian in a plastic bottle, Bad Durrheimer in a glass bottle, and tap water from two different taps.

Now, this was a blind experiment, so people had no idea what they were tasting, and people were challenged to correctly identify each sample as either bottled or tap.

These results showed the percentage of people who correctly identified each sample.

And for this analysis, the consumers were divided up by whether they regularly drank tap or bottled water.

That doesn't really matter.

What you can see here, though, is that all of the numbers hover at or below 50%, which means the consumers were completely unable to tell the difference between tap and bottled water.

If they had flipped a coin they would have been more accurate.

Okay, but that's just water, right?

The differences between tap and bottled water are a lot more subtle than the differences between brined and unbrined chicken.

I'm with you.

So, I tried to find a paper that compared brined to unbrined chicken.

I could not.

Doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere, so if you happen to have read it, let me know in the comments.

Instead, what I'm gonna do is show you this paper in which Italian scientists compare organic to conventionally-grown chicken.

Now, the authors did two things, here.

First, they recruited a panel of 10 people and then trained them on chicken meat sensory characteristics, things like tenderness, juiciness, residue left in your mouth after chewing, those kinds of things.

They also recruited 150 other people from three different cities in Italy and did not train them, though they did make sure that everyone on the panel ate chicken regularly.

They're not gonna recruit a bunch of vegetarians, here, for obvious reasons.

They fed organic and conventionally-grown chicken to both panels.

Now, the trained panel was able to reliably tell the difference between conventional and organic chicken based on tenderness, fibrousness, and residue left in the mouth after swallowing.

Now, the untrained panel, they were not asked to rate chicken based on specific attributes.

Instead, people were just asked how much they liked each sample.

Results?

People liked the conventional and organic chickens the same.

(pen clattering) No difference.

So, a panel of chicken experts was able to tell the difference between conventional and organic chicken, a panel of regular people was not.

And I think the exact same thing will be true of brined and unbrined chicken.

There's only one way to find out.

I'm here at Roaming Rooster in DC.

This is Mike.

Mike does not know the difference between the two bits of chicken that are in this cooler.

It's a double-blind experiment.

Mike is gonna help us out by cooking this chicken, and then we're gonna feed it to our taste-testers and see which is which.

- [Mike] Dip it in buttermilk water.

(upbeat music) - So, and did you experiment a lot with the chicken recipe?

Yeah, so it wasn't like- - No, no, no.

- Like family handed down generations?

No, it was just, it was like science.

You were experimenting.

- Yeah.

- [Andrew] What's the secret to the fried chicken here, then?

- [George] Oh, he can't tell us the secret.

- But you have to use a quality chicken.

That's the most important thing.

All this fat, it's supposed to be off.

(laughs) -[Andrew] We'll make that clear in the video that you normally use better chicken than what we brought you.

- [Mike] Yeah, please do!

(all laughing) (upbeat music) - [George] Hey, it's chicken time.

- [Testers] Oh, my gosh!

- Two samples of chicken.

They may be different, they may not be different.

All we need from you is which you prefer and why.

Let's do this, then.

Okay, now- - This is different.

- This is.

It has definitely got a lot more flavor.

- I think it's also more of like a melt-in-your-mouth feeling for A versus B.

- I would prefer A.

- So, all three of you prefer A?

- Yes.

- Well.

(beep) - This is brined.

- Wait a second.

You can taste the difference between these two chickens?

- Absolutely.

- [Tester] Yes, yes!

- [Tester] Totally.

- I cannot!

- [Tester] Oh, my God.

- [Andrew] I think we've discovered the problem.

(all laughing) - This one, I don't know.

For me, this kinda tastes, the chicken tastes plain.

- Plain?

- Definitely needs some dipping sauce or something like that.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Oh yeah.

(all laughing) - Everyone here thinks that A is the brined one and B is not, and we didn't even tell them that it was brined or not brined.

These annoying people picked it up on their own.

And you're right.

- If I have chicken in my teeth, please edit it out.

- Well, it appears that I was wrong.

And I thought for sure when we came in here this morning, I was like, "Oh, deep-frying it?

"Nobody will be able tell the difference, nobody!"

- None of you guys even tried this one.

- [Tester] George is like, "It's better, guys!"

- Everybody ate this.

- I know!

This is all gone and I'm the only one eating this.

Well, Mike, even though you and our testers proved me wrong today, I wanna say thanks for all your help.

We really appreciate it.

- Thank you for coming by.

- Definitely will more.

(upbeat music) - At least defeat tastes delicious.

If you enjoyed this episode and want more food science in your life, we're happy to tell you that PBS has you covered.

There's a show called "Serving Up Science" over on PBS Food that we know you will love.

It's a show that gets deep into the chemistry of food and leaves you with lots of science-backed tips for making your meals even better.

There are new episodes releasing now, so check the link in the description and let us know what you think.

Bon appetit!

You know, come to think of it, three people is a tiny sample size.

I mean, that's more anecdote than data.

Really, who's to say who won this challenge,