
The Truth About Brining Turkey - js2
http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/11/the-food-lab-the-truth-about-brining-turkey-thanksgiving.html
======
drivers99
If you don't want dry turkey, stop overcooking it. It's as simple as that. So
many people don't even take it out until it hits 180 degrees F. That's crazy!
Not overcooking is one of the keys to pretty much anything you want to cook,
actually. Also, use an oven bag, which traps all the moisture in the bag.
Comes out great when I make it that way, no need for basting or anything.
Learned about not overcooking from Mark Bittman:

> At least one reader has expressed concern that a turkey will not be done if
> its internal temperature is less than 165, as the U.S.D.A. recommends. The
> recipe calls for temperature of 155 because salmonella is killed at 140 (as
> long as it’s held there for 12 minutes). Further, if turkey is cooked to
> 155, its temperature will rise to 165 or higher while resting. A temperature
> of 165 isn’t unreasonable, but the turkey’s temperature will rise to 175 or
> 180 before serving, and that’s overcooked. If you’re more comfortable
> cooking to higher temperatures, feel free, but expect drier meat. [1]

[1] Mark Bittman - [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/classic-roast-
tur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/classic-roast-
turkey.html?_r=0)

~~~
IvyMike
> If you don't want dry turkey, stop overcooking it. It's as simple as that.

I'll agree with that.

But for a food that most people cook maybe once or twice a year, in a woefully
finicky home oven, on what many consider the most stressful day of the year, I
consider brining/salting a very acceptable insurance policy.

~~~
joeyo

      > ... in a woefully finicky home oven ...
    

This is a very good point. Older ovens often have inaccurate thermostats.
Getting a cheap ancillary oven thermometer can make a big difference.

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JoelSutherland
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is easily my favorite food blogger. I read just about
everything he writes because he ALWAYS puts in this level of effort and
detail. Towards the bottom of this page is his list of posts:

<http://www.seriouseats.com/user/profile/GoodEaterKenji>

If you found this post fascinating, there are plenty more like it.

~~~
tptacek
If you are not listening to Cooking Issues, even if you don't really cook
much, you are _seriously_ missing out. Cooking Issues is amazing.

~~~
dhimes
podcast?

~~~
tptacek
Yep, Heritage Radio Network. Extremely great.

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jemfinch
I like Kenji, but he's wrong about osmosis. Specifically, this claim
"Moreover, if you soak a turkey in a ridiculously concentrated brine (I tested
turkey in a 35% salt solution), according to the osmosis theory, it should dry
out even more." is completely wrong.

Osmosis works not only for water, but for the solutes themselves. Water
doesn't just (or even _initially_ ) move into the cells: salt, in fact, is
what initially osmotes into the cells (they have membrane pumps for equalizing
sodium concentration across the cell boundary), and then water follows, in
order to equalize overall solute concentration. That's why you see the turkey
take on water even when placed in a concentrated brine.

~~~
alwold
I wouldn't think any significant form of active transport would be going on in
a dead bird. Also, I think the sodium-potassium pump pumps sodium out, not in,
although you could be talking about a different pump?

In the absence of any pumps going on, I would imagine a 35% solution would be
extremely hypertonic compared to the interior of the cells, and water would
definitely flow out.

------
btilly
He didn't try what I always do. Mix salt with spices that I think I'll like,
and dry-brine with that.

The bird tastes like a bird, retains moisture, and the spices get in.
Personally I have a large enough fridge that I can afford to put a bird in a
garbage bag in it, so that isn't a problem.

~~~
brechin
Most garbage bags are not made of food-safe plastic, so be aware that you may
be ingesting substances you don't want.

~~~
tptacek
This is probably mostly an issue if you heat the bag.

~~~
brechin
No, the USDA and pretty much anyone regulating food safety agree that storing
food touching non food-safe plastics is always unsafe because the bags may be
made with or coated with chemicals that WILL leach into your food. This is
definitely accelerated by time (which brining involves) and temperature.

Ref: <http://lancaster.unl.edu/food/ftsep04.htm>
<http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/big_thaw/>

~~~
tptacek
The USDA link about garbage bags is in a graf about leaving foods to thaw out
in the open; "garbage bag" is in the middle of a list including "basement",
"garage", "dishwasher", and "kitchen counter". It's not discussing
plasticizers.

None of the text on the UNL page contradicts my suggestion that the risk of
chemical leaching is primarily caused by heating.

Definitely don't use garbage bags if they make you uncomfortable. For years,
people have also been uncomfortable about doing low temp cooks in Ziploc bags
for the same reason (it turns out that this is not a valid concern, but it was
a reasonable one until recently). Also! I am sure there _are_ trash bags you
definitely don't want to put food in. Some bags are scented. Some of them are
stiff and sort of starchy. I'd also stick with big brands.

~~~
brechin
From the UNL page, under "Plastic trash bags for food storage":

"The use of plastic trash bags for food storage or cooking is not recommended
by USDA '... because they are not food grade plastic and chemicals from them
may leach into the food.'"

From Glad themselves: "We do not recommend using Glad Trash bags for food
storage."

To each their own, of course. I'm happy to use zip-top bags for low-temp
cooking (they are food-safe after all), but garbage bags will be reserved for
use in the garbage can.

~~~
tptacek
Ziploc bags are food-safe, up to something like 85C. I would not count on off-
brand bags being food safe when heated.

------
ender7
The best Thanksgiving turkey I ever had was not brined but was salted and then
roasted at an incredibly low temperature (~250) for many, many hours. The
result was delicious, but it ties up an entire oven for most of a day, which
is simply not practical for many families.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Generally speaking, if you are working on poultry, lower cooking temperatures
work better. Why?

Primary constraint:

\- Meat center at least safe-temperature.

Secondary constraint:

\- The meat should be at the lowest temperature possible.

Within these constraints, the hotter the environment is, the more the outside
of the meat is going to exceed the safe temperature, and thus the tougher it
is going to be.

~~~
giardini
Couldn't you initially microwave the turkey to bring it's internal temperature
up to oven temperature and only then put it into the regular oven?

~~~
arh68
I don't think a microwave could effectively heat the center. The skin depth on
a turkey is probably only a couple inches so a microwave could only heat the
exterior.

~~~
leoedin
Microwave ovens don't heat from the outside in, like a conventional oven.
Microwaves are passed through the food, and the changing magnetic field causes
water and fat molecules to move through a process called dielectric heating.
The rate that food heats up within a microwave is completely dependent on what
it's made of, not where it is.

~~~
arh68
You are mostly correct, but I'd like to agree that the rate food heats up does
depend where it is. I know this intuitively, when the middle of my burrito is
cold when the rest is hot. Microwave ovens do not cook food evenly, and it's
not just due to wave nodes. See:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_heating#Penetration>

Part [0023] in particular: <http://www.google.com/patents/EP1991813A2?cl=en>

------
edgrimley
Judy Rodgers Zuni cookbook has great recommendations for salting vs brining.
She brines poultry as well as pork in a low-salt solution for several days.
I've found it to be very effective. She salts red meat for several days to
tenderize and flavor.

For turkey, we've switched from the Alton Brown brining strategy to a method
that involves salting overnight with a butter/herb mixture, and cooking the
dark meat and white meat separately. Dark meat in a braise, breasts roasted.
This has the added advantage of being able to braise the night before (even
better second day) and roasting for just 1-1.5 hours the day of. We were able
to completely prep for two days before this year, and I went for a bike ride
Thursday morning with kids and guests, who called me a show off. Credit to
David Tanis, former Chez Panisse chef for this technique.

[http://leitesculinaria.com/59625/recipes-roasted-turkey-
brai...](http://leitesculinaria.com/59625/recipes-roasted-turkey-braised-
turkey.html)

~~~
tptacek
Curing red meat is probably a bad idea; it toughens and changes the color of
the meet. When he was still at the French Culinary, Dave Arnold did a triangle
test where he simply salted a steak prior to a low-temp cook --- he didn't
leave it salting for days, just hours --- and all his tasters could identify
the pre-salted meat and all preferred the non-pre-salted meat.

Another thing to bear in mind is that brining poultry will make the skin
intractably flabby. You can air-dry the meat after your brine it (I had a fan
setup to do that), or remove the skin prior to brining to compensate.

~~~
wooster
Well, the salient point there is "prior to a low-temp cook". In that post:

[http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-
sa...](http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-salt-thats-
the-searing-question/)

Arnold was using sous-vide on the steaks, which has much different cooking
characteristics than high heat cooking.

I've generally found that liberally salting steaks with kosher salt up to
several hours in advance of grilling or roasting improves the flavor and
texture substantially. Serious Eats backs me up, here:

[http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips-
fo...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips-for-perfect-
steaks.html)

~~~
tptacek
In what way would the cooking characteristics of a low-temp cook exacerbate
the curing effect of salt on meat, apart from the fact that low-temp cooking
takes longer?

~~~
wooster
Well, in the case of sous vide it would be in a sealed bag, under pressure,
cooked longer. I would hypothesize that the increased pressure would help with
brine solution penetration of the meat. The sealed bag prevents moisture loss
to the environment. The lengthened cooking time would mean more time for the
brine solution to effect the contracting muscle filaments, and more time for
the solution to be pulled into the muscle cells.

This isn't what we want. We want the salt to effect the outside of the steak
the most, the portion that will be exposed to high heat when searing, because
that's where the most water loss will come from.

With a slow cook in a combi oven, the characteristics would be still
different.

~~~
tptacek
Steaks aren't typically cooked under vacuum pressure. Dave Arnold uses Ziplocs
for steak.

~~~
wooster
Not when he's going to re-therm. Also, from the post I linked above:

    
    
      A rib-eye was salted, seared, placed in a vacuum bag, 
      and cooked at 55 C for 1.5 hours, chilled, stored for 
      two days, rethermed at 52C for one hour, seared, and 
      served

------
__mharrison__
I've used Alton Brown's brine recipe for the past two Thanksgivings and gotten
rave reviews. In fact I may have been relegated to the "Turkey Cooker" :(

The salting method looks interesting, but I'm liking Sous Vide right now and
will probably do that next time around. One bath for white meat, another for
dark. Should be super moist and not lose flavor.

~~~
tptacek
Cooking low temp mitigates the brining requirement because there is little
chance of overcooking the meat. Also, the juices from the meat are going to be
held next to it for the whole cook, and none of it will evaporate. You don't
need to brine a low temp turkey.

Curing (what Kenji Lopez-Alt calls "dry brining") works just fine with a low
temp cook. It's also faster.

Alton Brown's turkey brine is chock-a-block full of aromatics and spices.
Kenji Lopez-Alt and the Serious Eats crew looked into this a year or so back;
those flavorings do impact the very outer layer of the meat (esp. if you don't
rinse thoroughly) but don't work their way into the meat; their molecules are
just too large to make it through cell membranes. I brine/cure with salt and
sugar and nothing else now and haven't noticed much of a difference.

------
jcoby
Why would you brine a chicken breast for 24 hours!? Wouldn't this account for
the difference in texture? With the surface area to mass ratio as one breast
has that would be like brining a turkey for a month (maybe more).

Everything I've ever read says that 30-60 minutes is plenty for a breast. Even
Alton Brown's fried turkey recipe [1] recommends 8-16 hours for a whole
13-14lb turkey.

The other thing not addressed in the article is the target cooking temperature
and rest time. Did he pull them at the USDA-recommended 165° or did he pull
them earlier and let them come up to 165°? Were the cuts allowed to rest?

1: [http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/deep-fried-
tu...](http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/deep-fried-turkey-
recipe/index.html)

------
VLM
WRT brining turkey vs aging beef it is an interesting hack that you can either
dry up and intensify flavor or moisten and water down flavor using a little
food science.

It is interesting that in the culinary arts there's a fixation on watering
down your turkey flavor yet drying and strengthening up your beef flavor by
drying/aging. An obvious next experiment would be brining up a beef steak and
seeing if you like steak when its all watered down. Or a comparison run,
watery beef vs dry turkey, which is "better".

Something that I think is missing is many of the traditional turkey dinner
side dishes are often pretty watery, compared to traditional steak side
dishes. So a dry bird is actually pretty good dining contrast with some wet
homemade cranberry sauce or inherently watery green bean and almond casserole
or moist mashed yams. A dinner made entirely of mush is a boring texture.

On the other hand, if you want watery poultry, experience it the easy way with
ground turkey chili or diced chicken taco meat, or chicken/turkey soup. I like
those too, perhaps partially because of the contrast between them and roasted
meat.

Not to reopen old wounds but I probably eat more turkey dinner / steak dinner
type food due to my sons medically diagnosed food allergies and my general
affection for a paleo diet and coincidentally the example I usually provide in
person of "what in the world is left for you to eat once you exclude
everything" is usually something along the lines of think of a stereotypical
thanksgiving dinner (or steak dinner) and take away the bread and you're
pretty much on the right track. In that line of thinking if you don't want a
dry bird you're much better off simply using a modern electronic thermometer
to make sure its not over (or under) cooked than spending endless hours home
processing your food. If a factory brined birds, there would be an outcry
about processed foods, but its somehow better if you do it, supposedly.
Actually its probably better from a contamination and food poisoning
standpoint to fool with the bird as little as possible while its raw,
regardless of any culinary science experiments or dietary beliefs.

------
thwest
That weight over time graph should really be a bar graph and not a line graph.

~~~
Scaevolus
It's a spline graph, which is even more misleading than a line graph. Note how
the control group has a small increase in weight before it's cooked.

------
jtsnow
There was a Nova episode about creating the perfect turkey. [1] They concluded
that the two keys to cooking a tender and flavorful turkey were 1) brining and
2) browning the outside of the meat.

The recipe is available here:
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2012/10/the-
science-...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2012/10/the-science-of-
thanksgiving-dinner.html)

[1] <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/can-i-eat-that.html>

------
drharris
I brine chicken all the time; I think that for any white meat, it's critical
in getting a result that people actually want to eat. However, brining turkey
has never been an option; we're typically running up to the day on thawing the
meat properly, and I don't have anything large enough to brine it in. We
inject and fry it anyway, so it's plenty juicy and the flavor comes from the
injection. Which can be too much flavor sometimes, but I've never had
complaints... especially when you compare it to the typical oven option.

I'll definitely be trying the salting method next time, and on my chicken too.
I do think this article is a bit misleading with all the bezier curves for
weight loss; I imagine that came from 3 discrete data points, so buyer beware.
But, if the end result is at all similar, it would definitely be the way to do
turkey.

I've also heard good things about rubbing the turkey down with mayonnaise and
herbs while it cooks in the oven. This apparently creates a skin texture more
like fried turkey, which helps in retaining juices. I imagine this method
combined with salting could produce a very tasty oven-cooked turkey.

~~~
tptacek
Won't mayonnaise just break in the oven? Wouldn't you be just as well off
basting the bird in oil?

~~~
WiseWeasel
I've got a great recipe for mayo/sour cream-covered halibut or other white
fish, oven-roasted. Not sure how well it holds up for a 5-hour turkey
roasting, but at least for 1-1.5-hour cook times, mayo seems to hold up ok.

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krosaen
While this article piques my geek sensibilities, its conclusions on taste
simply don't match my experience - brined turkey is delicious and gets rave
reviews every time either I or someone else who's hosting a turkey dinner
serves it.

------
jmspring
An upvote simply for a cooking/food related article on HN. Most of us are
involved in tech on a regular basis and sometimes we need a break. For me, one
outlet is my garden, cooking, exploring food.

------
grogenaut
All that charting and analysis into the moisture content and none of the same
into the actual taste.

~~~
jessaustin
The moisture charts he generated using a kitchen scale. To generate valid
charts for taste, he would have to use a blind panel of skilled human tasters,
which would have been much more expensive.

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bcambel
Maybe this comment will be totally out of the context, but please, Turkey is a
country whereas turkey is an animal. Please be a bit more respectful. Thanks

~~~
jpitz
Context or not, I doubt disrespect was intended. The capital casing in the
article title is a recognized norm in the written English language.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization#Titles>

~~~
bcambel
I intentionally did not use the word "disrespect". Thnx for the link.

~~~
jpitz
If one needs be "more respectful" then one is lacking in respect. The literal
dictionary definition of disrespect is a lack of respect.

