You need the sum of the meat and water weight, but the meat and water weight don't need to be the same.
In other words, meat and water need not weigh 500 grams each, total 1000 grams. 750 grams of meat and 250 grams of water is fine.
I know this post is quite old, but there is a ton of helpful stuff here and I didn't want to create a new post for a very related topic...
I am getting prepared to take my first stab at jerky and am reading as many posts as I can. (I'll be making a jerky post at some point in the near future, but will mainly follow Tony's Part 2 post
http://smokinitforums.com/index.php?topic=1561.0)
I want to give the EQ brine a try and will use the spreadsheet that Plan2Build shared (
http://smokinitforums.com/index.php?topic=4626.0) to determine the amount of salt/sugar to use.
After all the reading I've done, the above comment about water weight and meat weight confused me the most. Since most of what I read led me to believe that they need to be equal (just like Tony said). Since this post was well over a year ago, I'm hoping someone (Tony) has learned even more and can shed some more light on this part of the brining process.
I also just realized while making my batch of bacon that my food scale maxes out at 5lbs, so I had to use our regular, human, scale for that haha. I will probably do the same for the jerky since I'll want at least 5lbs of finished product. But if I don't have to weigh the water it'll make that a bit easier.
I am planning on using EQ brines going forward instead of the gradient brines, since I love the idea of repeatable/consistent results! Please correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no issues with removing the curing salt for brining brisket or pork butt, I would just have to "zero out" the mg/kg nitrate field to make sure the brine amounts are correct??
Lastly, what's the SHORTEST amount of time that I should be leaving something in the EQ brine?
Thanks for the help!