Make a Dry Pickle With Buttermilk Powder
I love soaking chicken in buttermilk. This is truly an unrivaled marinade. Lactic acid softens and adds flavor to meat, while proteins accelerate browning, resulting in a beautiful bronze hue, but incredibly tender and juicy. The only downside is that I usually buy buttermilk on purpose, so I rarely have too much in the fridge, but I do have buttermilk in the pantry.
If you bake a lot, you’ve probably heard of buttermilk powder: a dry, pungent, shelf stable powder that can hang in your pantry until you need it, allowing you to recover half a cup or so. you need for a recipe. This is very convenient and saves me from having to rush to the store every time I need a small portion of a baked product. But as I discovered just recently, it also makes an excellent dry brine.
Instead of dipping the meat in a vat of liquid buttermilk, you can mix the dry food with a little sugar and salt and sprinkle it on your protein. The mixture draws moisture from the meat, and this moisture is mixed with the buttermilk powder to form a concentrated marinade without additional water.
I tried it with chicken thighs this weekend and this is the step I will repeat. These thighs were brown, juicy, and very aromatic. (Unfortunately, the only photographic evidence of these beautiful thighs I have is one brightly lit iPhone photo, but you can still see the buttermilk powder at work pretty clearly.)
Accordingly, you will need one tablespoon of sugar and one tablespoon of sea salt for every 1/4 cup of buttermilk. (If all you have is iodized table salt, reduce the amount to 2 teaspoons.) Combine the dry ingredients, then sprinkle the mixture on any meat you want to marinate, taking care not to get too thick or lumpy. one stain, as it blocks moisture and prevents the marinade from forming. I used about three tablespoons of the bone and skin four thighs mixture. Once the meat is evenly sprinkled, drop it into the bag and let it hang in the refrigerator for 24 hours, turning the bag over whenever you remember to do it (two or three turns are enough).
Wipe off excess liquid the next day and cook the meat as usual. For those thighs, I just tossed them into a baking dish – no extra fat or seasonings – and toasted them at 400 ℉ until they reached an internal temperature of 170 ℉, then brushed them with juice from a skillet just before serving. The next day, standing in the kitchen, I ate two thighs in a row, then a third, cold thigh. My boyfriend ate the fourth before I could get it, but that’s okay – I can cook anytime I want.