Save Pin More. Start Slideshow. View Recipe this link opens in a new tab. This recipe makes enough brine for one to pound turkey. Replay gallery. Pinterest Facebook. Up Next Cancel. By Lynn Andriani. Share the Gallery Pinterest Facebook. Skip slide summaries Everything in This Slideshow. With a dry brine, the salt will initially draw the moisture out of the turkey, then the salty liquid formed will be reabsorbed, taking some salty flavour with it.
It will also dry out the skin, which helps it crisp up in the oven. Dry brining is easiest, as you can put the turkey in a bag or container that only just fits it. With a wet brine, you need to use a bucket or very large container in order to fit both the turkey and liquid. You can add flavour such as herbs, spices, garlic and citrus zest to both wet and dry brines, and the flavours will be drawn into the meat.
How to cook a turkey How to carve a turkey Best ever Christmas turkey recipes How to cook a turkey crown Complete Christmas dinner menus. Subscriber club Reader offers More Good Food. Sign in. That's why many people rely on brining, or soaking meat in a mix of salted water. Here's why: When a turkey is heated, the moisture in its meat is "flexed" out, according to Serious Eats. Heat them to [not] much above degrees Fahrenheit or so, and you end up with dry, stringy meat ," they explain.
The salt in the brine, therefore, will dissolve some of the proteins responsible for this flexing, which not only allows the muscles to absorb the brine, but release less of it when cooked. Once you get your water and salt, you can mix up many ingredients: sugar, honey, orange juice and herbs all "go a long way," Capon said.
The New York Times food writer Harold McGee says he doesn't brine , because "the collateral damage it does outweighs its advantages. This theory is, in fact, inaccurate.
If it were true, then soaking a turkey in pure, unsalted water should be more effective than soaking it in a brine, and we've already seen that that is not the case. To understand what's really happening, you have to look at the structure of turkey muscles. Muscles are made up of long, bundled fibers, each one housed in a tough protein sheath. As the turkey heats, the proteins that make up this sheath will contract. Just like when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste, this causes juices to be forced out of the bird.
Salt helps mitigate this shrinkage by dissolving some of the muscle proteins mainly myosin. The muscle fibers loosen up, allowing them to absorb more moisture, and, more importantly, they don't contract as much when they cook, ensuring that more of that moisture stays in place as the turkey cooks. Sounds great, right? But there's a catch.
There are two major problems with brining. First off, it's a major pain in the butt. Not only does it require that you have a vessel big enough to submerge an entire turkey common options are a cooler, a big bucket, or a couple of layers of heavy-duty garbage bag, tied together with hopes and prayers against breakage , but it requires that you keep everything inside it—the turkey and the brine—cold for the entire process.
For an extra-large bird, this can be a couple of days, meaning that you've either given up using the main compartment of your fridge at the time of year that you most want to use it, or that you keep a constant supply of ice packs or ice rotating to keep that bird cold. Second, brining robs your bird of flavor.
Think about it: Your turkey is absorbing water, and holding on to it. Many folks who eat brined birds have that very complaint: It's juicy, but the juice is watery. I've seen a number of solutions solutions, get it?
By far the most common alternative is plain old salting. When you salt a turkey or chicken breast, meat juices are initially drawn out through the process of osmosis yes, this time it really is osmosis at work.
As the salt dissolves in these juices, it forms what amounts to a very concentrated brine, which then allows it to break down muscle proteins. The loosened muscle fibers allow the juices to get reabsorbed, this time taking the salt along for the ride. Through this process—osmosis, dissolving, reabsorbing—the salt will slowly work its way into the meat. I've also heard people ask the very obvious question: If brining introduces bland, boring tap water into the bird, why not brine in a more flavorful solution?
Why not, indeed? I decided to find out. With so many methods to test side by side, it became impractical to try to roast turkey breasts simultaneously. Instead, I roasted 24 chicken breasts in four different batches of six, averaging out the data across the batches. While chicken is not exactly turkey, the two are similar enough that results for one should correlate to results for the other. Here's what I tried:.
Breasts 1 and 6 were included as a control to ensure that the brine and salt solutions were behaving as expected, as well as a means of evaluating how closely the data would mirror that of the turkey breasts.
Here's what happened with breasts 1, 2, 3, and 6 plain, brined, salted, and water-soaked. As expected, the brined chicken breasts held on to significantly more moisture than either the plain chicken breasts or the water-soaked chicken breasts.
Indeed, in this test, the water-soaked breasts actually ended up drier on average than the plain breasts. Take a look at the carnage:. Dry as the Gobi Desert on an admittedly very-moist-for-a-desert day.
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