I discovered brining a while back–my first brine was a roaring success in fact, served up back in 1996 for Thanksgiving turkey I cooked while in Portugal. Brined overnight with fresh limes & oranges in a salt water then cooked with LOTS of butter and olive oil, it was a fairly simple recipe, but it worked very very well. I’ve gotten more sophisticated since then, but I will always remember that first charge into brining–and how well it worked.
There are a few rules that I’ve learned about brining. First off, add the salt last. Brines need lots and lots of salt, but that messes with rule two. So I say add the salt last.
Just what is rule two? If your brine isn’t tasty to start with–throw it out! Seriously. You are about to add that flavor in massive doses to your meat, so if it doesn’t taste good now, cooking it isn’t LIKELY to help. Most likely its just going to make it worse. BUT!!! And this is very, very important: brines need to be salty, and if you taste the brine WITH the salt, you are going to hate it. Get a nice tasty brine, THEN add the necessary salt. You will get a lot better results that way.
So, with those two very simple rules in mind, I’m going to describe the experimental brine I made today. Our protein is chicken, which is nice because it takes on flavors very nicely. I started the brine with about 2 cups of pressed Apple Juice (the kind with pulp, not the clear stuff). This is the kind you like to spice and drink hot. You might see it sold as apple cider, but whatever. Good stuff, and a bit headier than the clear stuff. Also less sugary. But I’m getting off track. To this I added about two tablespoons of honey (yum!), two tablespoons each of lemon and lime juice and six thin slices of fresh ginger (no, I didn’t weigh it or measure it with a spoon, sorry–I’ll do that next time!). All this went into a pot on the stove to get nice an hot, then once I was happy with the flavor (see rule two), I added about four table spoons of salt (see rule one).
So what did I do with this yummy chicken (actually, I’m guessing it wasn’t too yummy until I cooked it, but whatever!)? I took some tortilla chips and grated parmesan, and put that in the food processor until very smooth, poured that into a large bowl. Then I beat four eggs in a different bowl. Once the chicken had brined for about 2 hours (and was completely thawed!), I sliced it into strips, dipped it in the egg once, coated it in the parmesan & chips mixture, then fried it in peanut oil. I’m extremely pleased with the result. My oldest son loved it (he had about 8 of the chicken strips, so that’s a good sign!), as did my wife, so I’m happy. The ginger & the apple flavor both came through very nicely, and the chicken was very moist and tender, just like it should be.
This is experimental chefery at it’s best–a completely untested idea, created and executed on the fly, but with solid basic cooking techniques underpinning it. Now go out and brine something!