Brining: How much salt and water?

Cafe Society
1

I’m going to attempt to brine a 3lb chiken and roast it. Never done it before. How much salt should I use in the water?

2

This is the brining recipe I have used to rousing success the last two times I hosted Thanksgiving. You can adjust the recipe to the proportions of your three pound bird (cut everything by four.)

3

skip the water. substitute for vodka. use salt.

4

Your basic brine is 1 cup of kosher salt to 1 gallon of water.
ivylass’ link is for the brine of the gods, from the other perfect master.
But if I am just doing a chicken for dinner, it’s 1 cup to 1 gallon.
If you want to get fancy, you can also add 1/2 cup brown sugar to the brine.
Enjoy!

5

I prefer to brine by weight rather than recipe. Shoot for about a 3% salt and 1.5% sugar solution for a versatile brine. The way I do it is to put the chicken in a vessel, add water a cup at a time until it completely submerges the chicken, take the chicken out, add an ounce of salt & half an ounce of sugar for every 4 cups of water, stir to dissolve and then put the chicken back in.

6

No recipe, but a rule of thumb. Should be about as salty as seawater. I usually also add peppercorns, minced garlic, and some kind of herbage to the brine. Turns out very tasty, although I use it for pork more than chicken.

7

Here’s Nigella’s brine recipe for turkey. I’ve done this twice and it was spectacular each time.

8

The kosher salt is key - if you use an equivalent amount of table salt, the brine will be too salty.

9

I’m back!

I took some of the advice but had to omit some stuff because I didn’t have time to go out and buy it. In the end, it was regular salt, soy sauce, garlic, and pepper. I soaked it overnight then flipped it to the other side this morning and soaked until before dinner. Then I covered it with seasoning and threw it in the oven.

The chicken turned out great! Very flavorful, not too salty at all except for the drippings. I had to reroast it a little bit after finding out the middle was still red, but other than that it was great. I couldn’t get the bones to be consistent with store-bought softness and some of the tendons were still a little tough, but overall I’m really happy with the flavor. Thanks everybody for the help!