Hi Chef Jacob,
I'm studying brining in all food industries in France to search potential way of improvement of the brining process and I found your fourth part video on brining which is really interesting. But there is something which disturbed me. In the case of meat, the brine go throught the skin and link with protein in the web created by negative ion. In your demonstration, no osmosis. But in the case of cheeses which can be salted by brine immersion, water is going out from the product (look like an osmosis effect to egalized salt concentration of brine and of the product) while ions are going in. We can see this because the humidity and even the weight of the product is lower but salty taste is higher at the end than at the start of the process. So there is an obvious experimental difference between meat and cheeses (to take an exemple). Of course cheeses don't have mussles, but until know I thought effect of brine was the same on each products and I don't find easily a solid answer to that...
So my question is : Does Salts have the same effect onto meat, fishes, cheeses and vegetables during the brining process...? If no, what is the difference ? (maybe it's kind of a long answer asked... at least a lead to the correct source of information will be strongly appreciated). Thank you for your answer