As Thanksgiving approaches, many home cooks start thinking about how to prepare the perfect turkey. A juicy, flavorful turkey is the centerpiece of a great Thanksgiving meal. Some cooks swear by brining the turkey before roasting, claiming it helps keep the meat moist and enhances flavor. But is brining really necessary? Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of turkey brining.
What is Brining?
Brining is the process of soaking meat in a saltwater solution before cooking. The saltwater mixture is called a brine and usually contains water, salt, and sometimes spices, herbs, sugars, or other flavorings.
The turkey is submerged in the brine often for 8-24 hours, in the refrigerator. The brining solution helps flavor and tenderize the meat. It also helps the turkey retain moisture during roasting, leading to a juicier end result.
The Benefits of Brining Turkey
There are a few potential benefits to brining a turkey
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Moistness – Brining causes the turkey meat to absorb some of the brine solution. This extra fluid plumps up the cells and results in a moister, juicier cooked turkey.
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Flavor – The salt and other flavorings in the brine help season the turkey and enhance its overall flavor
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Tenderness – The salt in the brine helps break down muscle proteins, resulting in slightly more tender turkey meat.
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Forgiveness – Brining provides a small buffer in case the turkey is slightly overcooked. The extra moisture makes it a little more foolproof.
The Downsides of Brining
However, brining does come with some drawbacks:
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Time – Creating the brine, chilling it, and soaking the turkey for 8+ hours takes extra time and planning. The bird ties up fridge space.
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Wet texture – While brined turkey is moist, some find the texture too wet or spongy from excess absorbed liquid.
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Diluted flavor – The moisture absorbed from a simple salt-water brine tends to dilute the natural turkey flavor.
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Extra sodium – A brine is essentially a saltwater bath, so brined turkey usually ends up with significantly more sodium.
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Not necessary – Modern mass-produced turkeys are already injected with salt solutions during processing for enhanced moisture.
Brining vs. Other Options
Due to the time and drawbacks involved with wet brining, many cooks opt for other salting methods:
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Dry brining – Rubbing the turkey all over with salt and letting it rest uncovered in the fridge. The salt helps season and retain moisture just like a wet brine.
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Under the skin – Placing salt, herbs, citrus, or other aromatics right under the skin helps add flavor without heavily salting the whole bird.
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In the cavity – Stuffing the cavity with lemons, onions, herbs, and salt provides flavor without brining.
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Basic salting – A light salting on the outside and inside of the turkey provides some seasoning and moisture-retention benefits without needing to brine.
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Injecting – Commercial turkey processors inject the raw birds with a salt and water solution. Many home cooks buy injectors to add their own flavors.
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No brining – With proper roasting technique, a flavorful rub, and basting, a turkey can turn out extremely moist and flavorful without any brining at all.
Do You Need to Brine a Butterball Turkey?
Butterball is a major commercial turkey brand sold in most U.S. grocery stores. Their turkeys are already injected with a saline solution of water, salt, and natural flavors. This pre-brining helps keep the meat seasoned, moist, and tender when cooked.
According to Butterball, their turkeys do not require brining before roasting. Their advice is to simply season the outside of the turkey as desired and roast. Any additional brining would result in over-salting. Consumers and cooking experts confirm Butterball turkeys roast up with perfectly moist breast meat without further brining.
When it comes to the question “to brine or not to brine”, the answer is that brining is purely optional. While it can provide some benefits to the finished turkey, it is time-consuming and not always necessary. Leaner, natural or heritage breed turkeys may benefit more from brining. However, most modern mass-produced turkeys like Butterball are already plumped up with salt solution during processing.
For the easiest roast turkey with moist, flavorful meat, rub the bird with herb butter or oil, stuff the cavity with aromatics, and use a roasting technique that locks in moisture, such as roasting at a lower temperature or tenting with foil. With the right method, a tender, juicy turkey can be achieved without the extra step of brining.
So What Does This Mean for My Turkey?
This is all well and good, but what does it mean? How do you apply it?
Well, let me end how I started: I dont brine my birds, because I like my birds to taste like birds, not like watered-down birds. Salting your meat is nearly as effective at preventing moisture loss, and the flavor gains are noticeable. Want to know the truth? Even advance salting is not a necessary first step. I see it more as a safeguard against overcooking. It provides a little buffer in case you accidentally let that bird sit in the oven an extra 15 minutes. As long as you are very careful about monitoring your bird, theres no reason to brine or salt it in advance.
That said, it doesnt hurt to take precautions.
What About the Flavored Brines?
First off, dont try to brine your turkey or chicken in cider (or any other acidic marinade, for that matter). Dont do it. Just dont. The acid in the cider will kick off the denaturization process in the meat, effectively “cooking” it without heat. The results? Ultra-dry meat, with a wrinkled, completely desiccated exterior, like this:
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More interesting were the results of the broth-soaked chicken. It seems like the ultimate solution, right? If brining forces bland water into your meat, why not replace that water with flavorful broth?
Unfortunately, physics is a fickle mistress who refuses to be reined in. When I tasted the broth-soaked chicken next to the plain brine-soaked chicken, there was barely a noticeable difference in flavor at all. The broth-soaked chicken still had the same hallmarks of a regular brined bird (juicy/wet texture, blander flavor). What the heck was going on?
There are two principles at work here. The first is that, while broth is a pure liquid to the naked eye, broth actually consists of water with a vast array of dissolved solids in it that contribute to its flavor. Most of these flavorful molecules are organic compounds that are relatively large in size—on a molecular scale, that is—while salt molecules are quite small. So, while salt can easily pass across the semipermeable membranes that make up the cells in animal tissue, larger molecules cannot.**
** Good thing, too; otherwise, youd be leaking proteins and minerals out of your body every time you took a bath.
Additionally, theres an effect called salting out, which occurs in water-based solutions containing both proteins and salt. Think of a cup of broth as a college dance party populated with cheerleaders (the water—lets call them the Pi Delta Pis), nerds (the proteins—well refer to them as the Lambda Lambda Lambdas), and jocks (the salt—obviously the Alpha Betas).***
*** I make no specifications as to the gender and sexual preferences of said classes of individuals, but for the sake of this analogy, let us assume that nerds and jocks are not attracted to each other and that cheerleaders attract both nerds and jocks.
Now, at a completely jock-free party, the nerds actually have a shot at the cheerleaders, and end up commingling with them, forming a homogeneous mix. Open up the gymnasium doors, and a few of those cheerleaders will leave the party, taking a few nerds along for the ride. Unfortunately, those gymnasium doors are locked shut, and the only folks strong enough to open them are the jocks. So what happens when you let some jocks into that party?
The cheerleaders, who were initially fine socializing with the nerds, will quickly and selectively flock to the jocks. The nerds end up finding each other, huddling into small groups, and twiddling their thumbs. When the jocks finally go to bust the gymnasium doors open at the end of the party, they leave hand in hand with the cheerleaders, leaving the nerds in the dust. In our sad tale, those Tri-Lambs never get their revenge.
The exact same thing is happening in a broth-based brine. Water molecules are attracted to salt ions and will selectively interact with them. The poor proteins, meanwhile, are left with only each other, and end up forming large aggregate groups, which makes it even harder for them to get into the meat. When the salt breaks down muscle fibers sufficiently to allow the uptake of water (the equivalent of our jocks breaking down those doors), plenty of water and salt gets into the meat, but very little protein does.****
The result? Unless youre using an extra-concentrated homemade stock, the amount of flavorful compounds that make it inside your chicken or turkey is very, very limited. Given the amount of stock youd need to use to submerge a turkey, this doesnt seem like a very wise move.
**** This phenomenon is used in biology to remove specific unwanted proteins from solutions. As more salt is added to a solution, proteins will form larger and larger aggregates, until they are eventually large enough to be visible to the naked eye and precipitate out of the solution. Those proteins can then be removed with centrifugation. By knowing the salt concentration that causes different proteins to precipitate, scientists can target specific proteins to be removed, while keeping the rest in solution. The excess salt can then be removed via dialysis (essentially microscopic straining).
How to Brine a Turkey
FAQ
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