Turkey Brine Seasoning

Brining is an age-old process that introduces salt and seasonings to meats in order to preserve and flavor them, and wet brines also help deliver moisture to lean meats to prevent them from drying out during cooking. Turkey Brine Seasoning is also called wet turkey brine, turkey brining blend, savory turkey brine, or brining seasoning.

What is Turkey Brine Seasoning

Turkey Brine Seasoning is a salty and sweet blend that’s made from turkey-friendly spices and herbs. This seasoning is boiled in plenty of water and cooled, and then used as a bath in which to soak your turkey. Covered and refrigerated, it can help you produce a juicy, flavorful bird, and do away with turkey’s unfortunate reputation as something that’s dry and flavorless.

When proteins cook, they tighten up, and lean meats pull together more tightly than fatty meat. You see this when you make a hamburger; an uncooked lean meat burger may start out flat and wide, but as it cooks it pulls together and may even become a little rounded at the top. It dries out a bit, too. Fattier meats, like a burger with a higher fat content, don’t tighten up as much, so they squeeze less moisture out from the middle of the meat and into the bottom of your pan. The moisture from the fat helps the protein fibers stay more relaxed. Thus, they shrink less, and stay juicier longer.

Wet brines allow moisture and seasonings to penetrate into the layers of muscle fiber, emulating the way fat keeps the muscle fibers relaxed. Turkeys are famous for having dry breast meat and juicy thighs, and wet brine helps to create a sort of equilibrium, evening out the moisture in the turkey and allowing the whole bird to cook at roughly the same rate, so leaner breast meat will not dry out before the dark meat is cooked.

The Story of Turkey Brine Seasoning

Brining, a salt-based method of preserving meat, has been in use around the globe for thousands of years. The earliest records of salt being used as a preservative was on fish. These records date back to the Sumerians, circa 3500 B.C.; by 3000 B.C., Jewish settlements around the Dead Sea were using salt water to preserve meats that were more than just fish. In 200 B.C. the Romans learned the secrets of curing meat with salt from the Greeks, and also came to understand that nitrates in the salt gave their meat that pink hue. Fast-forwarding to a more modern era, in 1608 A.D Native Americans taught the people of Jamestown, Virginia their time-honored tradition of salting, smoking and aging venison.

While brining has clearly been an option for ages, pop culture food historians point to a 1999 episode of Alton Brown’s TV show Good Eats as the catalyst for our current interest in brining. Promoting a fragrant array of herbs and seasonings and backed by science, Brown made a strong case for brining’s benefits in the fight against dry turkey, and started a culinary phenomenon. Not long after this episode aired, heavy hitters in the food world, like Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and Ruth Reichl, now retired, a former food writer for the New York Times and editor at Gourmet magazine, published their own brine recipes.

Food trends wax and wane in popularity, and there’s been some argument about wet brining vs. dry brining, vs. braising, vs. stuffing scandalous amounts of butter under the skin of the turkey and letting it roast away. Brining is not for everyone. It requires a lot of room, either in a refrigerator or in a cooler, and adds an extra day to preparation time, because you need to let the turkey sit in the brine so the salt can work on the proteins and the meat can absorb the flavors. But brine advocates point to the significant change in moisture retention in a brined bird; poultry loses at least 25% of its moisture during cooking, and longer cooking times can drive that up to about 30%. A turkey that’s been soaked in brine will only lose about 15% of its moisture.

What Does Turkey Brine Seasoning Taste Like

Turkey Brine Seasoning is a sweet-and-savory blend. It’s rich with black, green, and pink peppercorns, which deliver a bit of fruity heat and peppery zing. It’s got fruity and astringent juniper and zippy orange peel, boosted by the brassy clove-and-cinnamon richness of allspice. The flavor elevates thanks to the menagerie of herbs—camphorous bay leaf, piney rosemary, and a quartet of Mediterranean herbs, like sage, thyme, oregano, and gentle basil. It’s rounded out with onion and garlic, our pungent aromatics. Turkey Brine Seasoning is inherently salty, since it needs the salt to perform the chemistry of brining as well as boost flavors.

How Do I Use Turkey Brine Seasoning

For a medium-sized, 12-14 pound turkey, we recommend using 1 pound of Turkey Brine Seasoning.

Add Turkey Brine Seasoning to two gallons of brining liquid; you can use all water, or a combination of water and vegetable or chicken stock. Bring this to a boil, then remove from heat and allow to completely cool. When cool, put your turkey into a container, like a large stock pot or a brining bag. Pour the brine over the turkey and move it to a cool place. You can store it in your refrigerator, or in a cooler loaded with ice. If you use a cooler, check periodically to make sure the ice has not melted away. The turkey should sit in the brine at least 8 hours and up to 24 in your refrigerator or cooler.

An hour before you are ready to start cooking, remove your turkey from the brine. Discard the brine, rinse the turkey with cool water and then pat dry with paper towels. Let it come up to room temperature, and then prepare your turkey as you normally would for roasting.

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Ingredients: Salt, brown sugar, white peppercorns, orange, garlic, black peppercorns, onion, rosemary, pink peppercorns, allspice berries, juniper berries, green peppercorns, thyme, basil, oregano, sage and bay leaves.

Country of Origin: USA