Sho Spaeth is the lead writer and editor at ChefSteps.com. He is also the author of Homemade Ramen, a James Beard Award–nominated cookbook.

Sho Spaeth

Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

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turkey-brine-flowchart

Start Here!

Well, let’s ask that another way. Do you like perfectly seasoned, juicy meat that’s resistant to overcooking? If your answer is yes—and it is yes—then you should brine your turkey.

The only reasons we can think of for not brining a turkey are: It’s already been brined, or you’re super strapped for time. A lot of birds are brined before packaging, and brining an already brined bird is a waste of time and will likely lead to overseasoned meat.

If you’re super strapped for time, we get it; sometimes life gets in the way of the epic T-Day feast of your dreams. (Fear not, though. Our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/turkey-perfection-in-only-2-hours">Perfect Roast Turkey in Two Hours</a> will make it plenty epic.)

Once you’ve accepted that brining is a plus, if not a must, you have to pick the kind of brine you want to use. Each has its benefits (and some demerits), but one of the most important considerations is time.

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Crispy and Juicy Chicken-Fried Turkey

With a pressure cooker and a countertop oven, you can have a glorious Thanksgiving turkey on the table in just about two hours.

Two-Hour Roast Turkey

“Should I brine my bird?”

Using advanced spreadsheet technologies, our brine engineers have finagled a spreadsheet that gives you the correct amount of salt and/or sugar and/or water to create the right brine recipe for whichever parts of a chicken or turkey you want to cook in whatever fashion. <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SsDMLtP3Xv1qLoZDrcAdFes6EEtrCEALkmwezOT6Ds0/edit?usp=sharing">Go to the spreadsheet</a>, make a copy that you can edit yourself, enter the weight of your meat, and let the computer&#39;s processing power handle the math.
<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SsDMLtP3Xv1qLoZDrcAdFes6EEtrCEALkmwezOT6Ds0/edit?usp=sharing"></a>

Poultry Brining Calculator

We created this table to give you an overview of brining percentages for popular cuts of poultry, using average weights for each cut. If you buy a couple turkey legs at the store or pick up some chicken wings and the net weight on the package is close to the average weights on the chart, you can have at it with the salt and sugar percentages in the chart. For more precise quantities, you’ll have to use a calculator. (Remember, to calculate 1% of the weight of anything, you multiply the weight by 1/100.)

Of course, different brining methods accomplish different goals. To learn more about them and why you’d choose one over the other, read on.

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Poultry Brining Cheat Sheet

The Brining Table

Weighing whole chickens, chicken parts, and turkey parts is no big deal: Set a sheet pan on a scale, tare it, and plop the poultry on the sheet pan. 

Whole turkeys are so big, however, that they present a problem: You can’t weigh them on a standard kitchen scale. Most kitchen scales max out at 5 kg (11 pounds). If you want to brine a whole bird properly (unless you’re using a gradient brine), you need to know how much it weighs. So, short of breaking it into parts and weighing them separately, what do you do?

The simplest solution is to note the net weight on the turkey packaging. Then, remove the turkey from its package, reserving bag juices and giblets. Weigh the giblets and bag juices, and subtract that weight from the net weight on the packaging. 

Don’t skip this step; in our tests, the total weight of bag juices and giblets reached up to 950 g (~2 pounds), which can significantly throw off brine calculations.

How to weigh a turkey

Different Kinds of Brines

Time: 1 to 24 hours
Recommended for: Crispy-skin roast turkey or chicken (especially spatchcock), sous vide poultry
Salt concentration for turkey: 1%
Salt concentration for chicken: 0.5%
How salt concentration is calculated: ([Salt weight]/[Meat weight]) x 100

Want a cheffy-sounding term for seasoning food with salt that will make a lot of chefs mad when you use it? Meet the dry brine. This is as simple as it gets: Apply salt to the exterior of the meat. While there is no added water, the salt draws out liquid present in the meat and dissolves, forming a concentrated brine, which is then absorbed by the meat thanks to diffusion. When done right, dry-brined poultry is still very juicy and very well-seasoned.

The “dry” in dry brining distinguishes the process from more traditional brines, where meat is submerged in a salt solution. Aside from the fact that you don’t have to wrestle with a tub of water, dry-brined poultry is generally more flavorful than wet-brined, simply because the bird isn’t absorbing excess water.

Since there’s no added water, dry-brined poultry skin browns and crisps more readily than meat that’s been submerged in a liquid brine. For this reason, dry-brined meat is often left uncovered for the duration of the brining time in a refrigerator, where the forced, dry air helps to further dry out the exposed surfaces. 

For sous vide applications, there’s no inactive brining time prior to cooking; pairing a long brining time with extended sous vide cooking time can lead to hammy results. Season the poultry parts, bag them, and cook right away.

Benefits:
Easy and convenient
Requires very little space and no special equipment
Juicy, well-seasoned meat
Concentrated flavor
Crispy skin
Less of a “cured” or “hammy” cooked texture

Drawbacks:
Incomplete penetration of “brine” 
Adds at least 1 hour and up to 24 hours to prep time
More difficult to evenly season bone-in, skin-on poultry

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Ultra-Tender Sous Vide Turkey Breast

Juicy and tender turkey is fried to perfection with an incredible crispy, crunchy crust. This is the best way to fry turkey, for Thanksgiving or any day!

Extra-Crispy KFC-Style Fried Turkey

Want to win Thanksgiving dinner? Learn to butcher a whole bird, then follow this recipe to prepare it sous vide. Meat’s juicy. Skin’s crispy. Everybody’s happy.

Sous Vide Holiday Turkey

Crispy, Tender Sous Vide Confit Turkey Legs

Pan-seared brick chicken recipe (chicken under a brick)

Pan-Seared Brick Chicken

Sous vide Thanksgiving turkey roulade recipe.

Sous Vide Turkey Roulade

Pollo al Carbon recipe (grilled, marinated whole chicken)

Pollo al Carbon

Dry Brine

Time: 45 minutes to 4 hours for roast turkey/chicken, 1 to 3 days for deli-style turkey and traditional confit
Recommended for: Deli-style turkey breast, traditional duck confit
Salt concentration: 9% for roast turkey/chicken, 1.5 to 3% for traditional confit, 3% for deli-style turkey
How salt concentration is calculated: (Salt weight/Meat weight) x 100 

Dry-curing refers to a seasoning process where you pack a heavy amount of salt (and sometimes sugar and other seasonings) on the surface of the poultry, let the poultry cure, then (often, not always) rinse off the salt mixture before cooking. The concentration of salt is higher compared to a dry brine, which helps more assertively season the meat, firm up its texture, and in the case of cold cuts, charcuterie, and confit, preserve it. 

Dry-curing meat draws out moisture, which makes it an important technique for preserving meat, like aged hams and other cured whole muscles, like pancetta. When using this dry-curing method to season meat rather than cure it, it’s best to use a shorter salting time, so you don’t end up with a dry and hammy result.

We should note that for the two dry-cured and sous vide preparations below—<a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-turkey-deli-meat">deli-style turkey breast</a> and <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/easy-crispy-duck-leg-confit">sous vide duck confit</a>—we don’t rinse off the cure, as we did not notice any benefit to doing so before cooking. The duck confit follows our sous vide dry-brine method (just with a higher salt concentration) rather than a 1- to 3-day traditional confit dry cure; the legs are seasoned with a salt-sugar mixture, bagged, and cooked sous vide immediately. With sous vide, we didn’t find that an extended dry cure before cooking produced an appreciable difference in flavor and texture in the confit. This method saves you time and tastes great, every time.

Benefits:
Requires minimal space and no special equipment
Fast results
Assertive seasoning
Concentrated flavor
Transforms texture; firms up meat
Preservation

Drawbacks:
Small margin for error; risk of overcuring, producing salty results
Can dry out meat
Uneven texture; surface firmer than center
Difficult to evenly season bone-in, skin-on poultry

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Joule gets these duck legs super tender, and a hot broiler crisps up the skin for juicy, fall-apart meat and a satisfying crispy crunch.

Sous Vide Duck Leg Confit

With a simple dry brine and the magic of sous vide, this recipe is your secret to making delicious turkey deli meat at home.

Sous Vide Deli-Style Turkey

Dry Cure

Time: 1 to 4 hours for poultry parts, 16 to 24 hours for whole turkey and chicken
Recommended for: Super-juicy Butterball-style turkey and classic roast chicken
Salt concentration: 5%
How salt concentration is calculated: (Salt weight/Water weight) x 100

Gradient brines are the traditional wet brines that people generally think of when considering brining a bird for Thanksgiving. They’re concentrated salt solutions that meat is either submerged into or injected with. Like a dry cure, gradient brines deliver a higher concentration of salt than you would use if simply seasoning a piece of meat and cooking it right away. 

Gradient brines produce super-juicy poultry. Think Butterball turkey and rotisserie chicken. That’s because the poultry is absorbing water during the brining process, and then holding onto that water during the cooking process thanks to salt in the brine having done its part of denaturing myosin proteins, which loosens muscle fibers and increases their water-holding capacity. 

On one hand, this is a good thing: Who doesn’t love juicy roast turkey? But that juiciness comes at a cost: diluted flavor. The bird is juicy because it’s full of water absorbed from the brining process. Submerging a turkey in a vat of brine requires a lot of fridge space, and it also makes it harder to effectively brown and crisp the skin when roasting. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9BISHFOFXQ">Moisture is the essence of wetness</a> but the enemy of crispiness. That’s why we recommend an injection approach for gradient brines for <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-roast-chicken">roast chicken</a> and <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/turkey-crown">turkey</a>; you get the juicy results of a wet brine without sogging out the skin or sacrificing your entire fridge to a 22-quart Cambro.

Benefits:
Super-juicy meat
Even seasoning for bone-in, skin-on poultry

Drawbacks:
Hassle
Time-consuming; takes 16 to 24 hours for a whole bird
Requires a lot of fridge space and/or special equipment (syringe, 22-quart Cambro or cooler) 
Diluted flavor
Harder to achieve crispy skin

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Ultimate Roast Chicken

Roast Turkey Crown

Gradient Brine

Time: 3 to 5 days for poultry parts, 5 days for whole chicken, 1 week for whole turkey
Recommended for: Super-juicy, evenly seasoned roast turkey and chicken
Salt concentration: 1%
How salt concentration is calculated: ([Salt weight]/[Meat weight + Water weight]) x 100

An equilibrium brine is also a wet brine, but unlike a gradient brine that uses a strong salt solution to speed up the seasoning process and requires you to remove meat from the brine before it becomes oversalted, an equilibrium brine uses the exact concentration of salt you want to season your meat. By submerging meat in the brine for an extended period, you allow the meat to come in equilibrium with the brine, so the meat is seasoned exactly how you want it, with no risk of oversalting. Think of it as the sous vide equivalent of brining: It takes guesswork out of the equation, but it takes a while. 

Because of the long brine duration, equilibrium brines can be used to impart additional seasoning, such as spices and herbs, to the exterior of brined meats. And if you want to get very exact about equilibrium brining a bone-in bird, you can calculate the weight of the bones and subtract it from the total weight of the meat. <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/equilibrium-brining">Check it out.</a>

Benefits: 
Perfect, even seasoning 
No risk of oversalting 
Super-juicy meat

Drawbacks:
Hassle
Slowest brining method; takes 1 week to brine a whole turkey
Requires a lot of fridge space, for an entire week
Diluted flavor
Harder to achieve crispy skin

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Equilibrium Brining

Equilibrium Brine

What is brining?
Brining is a commonly used method for evenly seasoning raw ingredients using salt. Brining also increases the juiciness of cooked meat and alters its texture—the tight, “hammy” texture of deli meats is a good example of how the application of a brine can fundamentally change the texture of cooked meat.

How does brining work?
The way brining works is through osmosis and diffusion. When a piece of meat or fish is submerged in a solution of salt and water, the solution travels through permeable cell walls as the two systems—the fluid contained in meat cells in contact with the solution and the solution itself—try to achieve equilibrium, where the concentration of salt within both liquids are equal. With time, some of the salt and water absorbed by the cells in contact with the solution are absorbed by cells closer to the interior. Given enough time, the entire piece of meat will reach equilibrium with its brine; the concentration of salt in the meat will be equal to the concentration of salt in the brine.

What are the effects of brining?
Brining brings about several important changes to the structure and composition of ingredients that have been sunk in the brine. Brined meats contain more salt than un-brined meats, so they are, of course, saltier. They also contain more water (although this depends on the concentration of the brine—more on that in a second), which is, in part, why cooked brined meat is “juicier” than cooked meat that hasn’t been brined.

But juiciness isn’t just a function of how much water meat contains; it’s also determined by how well the meat holds onto water as it cooks. Meat fibers contract when heated, and the more violently they contract, the more water they expel (think of the gray band around a steak cooked “blue”). 

When meat fibers are exposed to a salt solution, it dissolves myosin, a protein in the fibers that helps them contract, which in turn makes the fibers contract less violently when exposed to heat, improving water retention. But when myosin dissolves it also forms a gel, which binds water and prevents it from being expelled. So, a brine encourages juiciness by adding more water to the meat cells, weakening the muscle proteins’ ability to contract, and by forming a gel that binds water in the meat and prevents it from escaping.

Frequently Asked Questions

“Should I brine my turkey?” “Is ‘brining’ just a fancy word for ‘salting’?” “What does a brine even do?” “I’ve got to brine my bird for 5 days??”For many home cooks, the questions of when and whether to use a brine (and why!) mostly come up during the holidays, when you’re getting a big old turkey ready for Thanksgiving. There are several different brining methods that you can employ, each with pros and cons. To help you decide whether or not you want to brine your bird, we’ve created a decision tree/flowchart. If you find you do want to use a brine, we’ve created a chart to use as a quick reference guide for brine ratios and timing for standard poultry parts and weights, as well as a poultry brining calculator spreadsheet that you can use to input the precise weight of your bird (or bird parts) to get the exact measurements for the brine of your choice, along with suggested brining times.

The Ultimate Guide to Brining Turkey