Advanced options
Percentages are salt as a share of water weight: 1L of water = 1000g, so 6% = 60g salt per litre. Dissolve fully (warm a little of the water if needed, cool before the meat goes in), brine in the fridge, and rinse and dry before cooking. Skip brining anything already cured or "basted": it's been done for you.
What The Brine Calculator Works Out
- Salt: litres of water x 1,000g x the strength, so a 6% brine is 60g of salt per litre and 2 litres takes 120g. Soaking meat in a 5% to 6% solution lets salt migrate inward and loosens muscle proteins so they grip more water through cooking, which is behind the brined turkey's survival of Christmas.
- Sugar: half the salt's weight for poultry and pork brines, adding browning and balance rather than sweetness. Skipped for vegetable ferments, where sugar feeds the wrong organisms.
- Timing guide: timing scales with thickness and strength. A 10% quick brine does chicken pieces in 30 to 60 minutes and chops in 1 to 2 hours; a 5% to 6% brine takes a whole chicken 4 to 8 hours, a turkey 12 to 24 and pork joints 6 to 12, always in the fridge. Ferments at 2% to 3.5% run days at room temperature.
- Custom strength and sugar share (advanced): any percentage (saturated brine is about 26%) and any sugar ratio, for recipes that specify their own.
- Salt in spoons (advanced): the weight converted for your salt: fine sea salt packs about 18g into a level tablespoon, coarse or flaky salt only about 12g, which is why volume recipes go wrong and iodised table salt's additives earn their exclusion.
- Dry-brine alternative (advanced): enter the meat's weight and see the dry-brine salt at 1% of it. Salting the surface and resting uncovered in the fridge achieves the same seasoning and moisture chemistry without the bucket, and leaves skin drier and crisper, which is why the roast-chicken canon migrated to salting the night before.
- Container (advanced): the brine volume plus what goes into it, so you know whether the stock pot or a brining bag will fit in the fridge.
- Aromatics (advanced): a classic bay, peppercorn, garlic and thyme set or a festive orange, cinnamon and clove set scaled to the water, simmered in a little of it and cooled before the meat goes in. Anything sold "basted", "self-basting" or cured has been brined industrially already, and double-salting is the classic first-timer's oversalted lesson.
- Your brining time (advanced): checks the hours you plan against the strength: thin cuts turn hammy past 2 hours at 10%, and anything beyond 24 hours at 6% picks up a cured edge. Brined food is, by construction, saltier food.
Food safety basics: Food Standards Agency.