I’ve gone on a bit about brining your turkeys in the past, and I still think it’s a great way to season your turkey and get a moister bird. But in recent years, the technique of pre-salting meat has been gaining traction.

Pre-salting meat was recently popularized by chef Judy Rodgers of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. It basically involves sprinkling salt over the meat (about 1 T of kosher salt for every 5 pounds of turkey), and letting it sit for an extended period of time (3 days). Like with brining, the purpose is to season and improve the texture of the meat.

The LA Times did a comparison last year called the Great Turkey Smackdown (which is sadly not available online anymore). Their tasting panel concluded that pre-salted turkey resulted in a pleasingly firm, yet moist texture with a purer turkey flavor. Luckily you can see a copy of the article posted here.

Cook’s Illustrated Magazine (paid registration required) also did a comparison of pre-salting vs brining, and agreed that the turkey flavor was more pronounced, but that the turkey breast in a pre-salted turkey was more likely to become dry. They remedied this problem by icing down the turkey breasts so that they cooked more slowly.

Bloggers and internet forums, like eGullet, were buzzing with talk of the technique. If you read that whole thread, you’ll see soeme great taste-test comparisons between pre-salted meat and brined meat.

To break things down:

For both techniques, people have complained about salty gravy from the pan drippings, but I usually don’t have this problem since I make gravy from a combination of turkey stock and pan drippings. If you make gravy mostly from the drippings, you might have to keep this in mind.

If you’re looking for more specific instructions on pre-salting turkey, try these links:

Copy of The Great Turkey Smackdown

Roast Salted Turkey (LA Times)

A basic turkey brine is 1 cup of table salt to 1 gallon of water (for a short 4-hour brine), though some recipes use less salt and a longer brining time. Here are a couple examples:

A turkey brine from AllRecipes

An herb-roasted turkey recipe which includes a recipe for a 2-day brine from Bon Appetit

You can also search our site for hundreds of turkey brine recipes. Note that a common complaint with brined turkey is it’s hammy flavor. This flavor seems to be caused by theaddition of sugar to the brine. So you might want to avoid or adjust recipes that call for sugar or sweet ingredients.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.