Brined Pork

This is part of our experiments on whey-vats as preserving and flavoring for various foods. See here for further explanations and other experiments: Preserving Meat

It is a part of Icelandic food tradition to "brine" meat in whey prior to cooking. Whey was also used as preservative for both cooked and raw foods. This is one hypothesis of how that might work. 

Gersvinda took a large pork roast and cut it into three chunks. She put them into a sterile glass jar, and filled it with the standard brine (3 TBS salt per 1 L of water, or seawater that has been boiled). 

This first soak she left in the fridge for 3 days. 

Then she removed the meat from the brine, cleaned out the jar, put the meat back in, and filled it with home-made yogurt whey, garlic, and mustard. 

She roughly crushed the brown mustard seeds in a mortar, and knife-crushed the garlic. 

This went back in the fridge for another 3 days. 

It came to the event in the jar, when we were ready to cook it, we got the grill hot, then put the meat onto the grill, turned it several times, and when it was done in the middle, ate it. 

Most of it rested a while because we were busy eating the first part.