Brine, Brining or Salt Solution? A Guide to Brining Meat

Brine, Brining or Salt Solution? A Beloved Child Has Many Names

Brining (what Swedes call "rimning") meat, fish and poultry is something people have done since time immemorial.
It gives the meat more flavor, it gets more tender, and it can even shorten the cooking time slightly.

In the BBQ world this is called brining, which is also what I prefer to call it, but you can call it a salt solution, rimning, or really whatever you like.

What Actually Happens When You Brine Food?

This is a chemical process and no hocus pocus.

Most raw ingredients already contain salt water, and what happens when you put, say, a piece of meat in a "bath" with a higher concentration of salt than the meat already contains is that the salt water is absorbed by the meat.
At the same time, the salt water mix pulls in the other flavors you’ve added to the water.

This means you end up with a juicier, more flavorful and more tender piece of meat than before.

So How Do You Do It?

It’s important to give your ingredients time to take in the flavors and the salt.

That doesn’t happen in a quarter of an hour.
So you should brine your ingredients for at least 24 h, depending somewhat on size, but whole birds and larger cuts of meat should definitely sit in the brine for a full day.

The basic recipe is that you want about a 10 percent solution.

That means about ⅓ cup + 1½ tbsp of salt to 4 ¼ cups of water.

Another way to measure the optimal solution is to use a raw egg.
If the egg floats just right when you put it in your brine, you have an optimal mix.

This can cause a problem when you add your ingredients, since they may float too.

So you sometimes need to put something heavy on top of your ingredients so they’re completely covered by the brine.

You can also use zip-top bags where you remove all the air, to get the whole ingredient covered by the salt solution.

What Meat Can You Brine?

Really whatever you like. It’s usually an advantage to brine any meat you want to cook low and slow.
The most common thing is probably to brine chicken and turkey and larger pieces of meat that will be grilled whole, but it’s never a disadvantage to brine smaller cuts too.

Quite the opposite.

If you want to see how an apple brine works in practice, that’s exactly the setup I use in my Beer Can Turkey.

You do have to plan ahead a bit, since it takes quite a lot of time to get a good result, but it’s clearly worth it.

Here you can really experiment with flavors however you like.

Nothing says it has to be water.
Any liquid works, the main thing is that the liquid has a higher concentration of salt than the ingredient itself.
Here you can use beer, juice, wine, vinegar and mixtures.
Then add the spices and herbs you want your ingredients to take on flavor from.
It’s up to you.

I’m a big fan of using beer myself, which I think is fantastic in many ways, not least for chicken.
I usually buy cheap beer at the grocery store, since the alcohol content doesn’t matter at all in this context.

Here Are Some of My Favorite "Brines"

Apple Brine