Chris' simple chicken brine???


 
K

Kirk Boorman

TVWBB Super Fan
I used Chris' brine:
Brine For High-Temp Chicken
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1 gallon cold water
1 cup Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
1/2 cup sugar
Combine ingredients in a non-reactive container, mixing thoroughly to dissolve salt and sugar. Makes enough brine for a 3-4 pound chicken. Substitute 3/4 cup Morton Kosher Salt or 1/2 cup table salt for Diamond Crystal.
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I used it on some 1/2 chickens (they were about 4.5 lbs whole). I brined them for 4 hrs, rinsed them well and cooked at about 300. Man, they was some salty chickens. What went wrong?
 
I have never tried brining myself...I understand that some people are more sensative to salt - and I would include myself among that crowd. I believe soaking in salt water would make the chicken unpalitable.

In order to keep my chickens from drying out, I marinade each whole butterflied chicken in Italian Dressing for a day. I think it helps them stay nice and juicy and the taste goes great with lemon-pepper seasoning.

Jeff
 
You may or may not have done what I did by mistake.... Did you use a rub with salt in it? It did some brined wings.. the ones with salt in the rub ended up being too much while the rubs without salt were excellent.
 
The rub did have salt and I will definately leave it out next time but the salty flavor penetrated all the way through the meat. I didn't think that the rub could do that on its own.
 
That may be the case. I'm sure salt in the rub didn't help any either. If it was too much for you I'd cut down the brine time. Then again I really like brined chicken as long as I don't use a rub with a decent amount of salt in it.
 
Kirk--

Did you use Diamond Crystal kosher? If not, did you make the necessary change in amount?
 
I used 3/4 cup of Morton's. I know that there's a minimum concentration requirement for the brine to work so which do you think would be best, cutting back to 1/2 cup Diamond Crystal, cutting back to two hours in the brine or both?
 
I'd cut back in time rather than salinity. For half chickens, I only do about two hours in that kind of a brine.

But, maybe a more important question is, did you happen to use either an "enhanced" chicken or maybe a kosher chicken, like empire? brining either of those will result in a salty chicken.
 
For chickens that size I brine 1 cup kosher salt/1 gallon water for 1 hour. It's the 1:1:1 formula. Always works great.
 
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