Brining is a popular technique to impart moisture and flavor into lean poultry like turkey. However, it can easily make the turkey overly salty if not done properly. Don’t despair if your brined bird has turned out unpleasantly salty. There are several tricks you can use to fix an over-brined turkey and still save your holiday meal.
How Does Brining Make Turkey Salty?
Brining involves soaking meat in a saltwater solution before cooking. The salt allows the turkey to retain more moisture as it cooks, keeping it juicy and tender. But all that salt needs to go somewhere – namely into the turkey meat.
Too much time in a heavy brine can make the turkey inedibly salty. This is especially true if you brined a frozen turkey as many frozen birds are pre-injected with salty solutions.
Signs Your Turkey is Too Salty
Some telltale signs your brined turkey is too salty include
- Very salty drippings for the gravy
- Salty smell and flavor in the white and dark meat
- Extreme thirst after eating the turkey meat
- Soft, spongy texture from over-absorbing brine
Taste a small piece of turkey meat before cooking the whole bird. It’s much easier to fix an over-brined turkey before it has cooked versus after.
4 Ways to Reduce Saltiness in Brined Turkey
Don’t panic if your test tastes like you marinated the bird in seawater. Here are four techniques to desalinate your turkey:
1. Rinse Thoroughly After Brining
Give the turkey a good cold water bath to wash off excess surface salt from the skin and cavity. Let water run inside the cavity as well to flush out brine.
2. Soak in Fresh Water
After rinsing, submerge the turkey in a sink or pot filled with cold water for 15-30 minutes. This helps draw out absorbed salt from the meat.
3. Use Low-Sodium Chicken Broth for Gravy
Opt for low-sodium or no-salt added chicken broth when making your gravy. This prevents compounding saltiness.
4. Dilute Gravy with Cornstarch Slurry
If the gravy itself seems too salty, you can dilute it by whisking in a cornstarch slurry (equal parts cornstarch and water). This thins and reduces salt concentration.
Tips to Prevent Over-Brining Next Time
Learn from any brining mistakes and adjust your technique to avoid overly salty birds in the future:
- Don’t brine frozen turkeys marked “injected with sodium solution”
- Reduce brining time for large birds to 12-18 hours max
- Use lower salt ratio in brine of 1 cup salt to 1 gallon water
- Rinse and soak turkey after removing from brine
- Use fresh low-sodium chicken stock for gravy
With some quick troubleshooting, you can still save an over-brined turkey and whip up tasty gravy. Let your mistake be a lesson for brining properly next time around. Just be thankful for the learning experience!
Brining Alternatives
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.
Ive 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.
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Heres what I tried:
- Breast #1: plain (untreated)
- Breast #2: brined overnight in a 6% salt solution
- Breast #3: heavily salted overnight
- Breast #4: brined overnight in chicken broth with a 6% salt content
- Breast #5: brined overnight in cider with a 6% salt content
- Breast #6: soaked overnight in plain water
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.
Heres what happened with breasts #1, #2, #3, and #6 (plain, brined, salted, and water-soaked).
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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:
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Dry as the Gobi Desert (on an admittedly very-moist-for-a-desert day).
On the other hand, take a look at the brined breast:
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As plump and juicy as a benevolent aunt in a Disney film. Tasting it, you definitely feel a case of wet-sponge syndrome. Water comes out of it as you chew, giving you the illusion of juiciness, but the texture is a little too loose, and the flavor a little bland.
Moving on to the salted breast, we find that its still significantly moister than the unsalted breast (though it was a couple of percentage points drier than the brined breast). Tasting it, youll find its undoubtedly juicier and better-seasoned, with a stronger chicken flavor. Texture-wise, its significantly different from both plain and brined turkey, with the smooth, dense-but-tender texture of lightly cured meat.
Visually, you can see clear signs of this curing with its decidedly pink hue:
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With a small chicken breast, this pink, moist, cured section extends nearly to the center of the breast. On a turkey, youd see it only around the outer edges (which, serendipitously, happen to be the parts most prone to overcooking and drying out anyway).
While the brined breast was slightly juicier, flavor-wise and texture-wise, Id take the salted chicken over the brined any day.
The Problems With Brining
There are two major problems with brining. First off, its 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 youve 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.
“brining robs your bird of flavor”
Second, brining robs your bird of flavor. Think about it: Your turkey is absorbing water, and holding on to it. That means that that extra 30 to 40% savings in moisture loss doesnt really come in the form of turkey juices—its plain old tap water. Many folks who eat brined birds have that very complaint: Its juicy, but the juice is watery.
Ive seen a number of solutions (solutions, get it? haha) offered for this problem, so I decided to test them all out side by side.
Will brining a frozen turkey make it too salty?
FAQ
What happens if you over brine a turkey?
What if I put too much salt in my brine?
Can you over salt a turkey dry brine?
Does brining a turkey make it high in sodium?
Is brined Turkey too salty?
There are a few things you can do to prevent brined turkey from being too salty: * Use less salt in the brine. As mentioned above, the most common cause of brined turkey being too salty is using too much salt in the brine. To prevent this from happening, use a moderate amount of salt in the brine.
How do I reduce the saltiness of a brined Turkey?
A: There are a few things you can do to reduce the saltiness of a brined turkey. * Rinse the turkey under cold water for several minutes. This will help to remove some of the salt from the surface of the turkey. * Place the turkey in a large bowl or pot and cover it with cold water. Let the turkey soak for several hours or overnight.
Do you need salt to brine a Turkey?
The salted brining liquid has penetrated the turkey from the inside. Though no additional salt is needed and could create a salty bird, feel free to coat the turkey in herbs or other spices for added flavor. How Much Turkey Per Person Is Enough?
Can You brine a turkey if it’s not cooked?
If the turkey weren’t cooked yet, it’s possible to try to put it in pure water (rather than brine), and gradually some the salt will come back out into the water. After sitting for a while, replacing the water with more fresh water can speed up the process.