Turkey Brining

In my NYC family, I take turns with the in-laws for the annual holiday festivities. Beginning with Thanksgiving, which I am usually responsible for, my sister-in-law and her family then host the Christmas dinner, we do New Years Day, they do Easter, we do Passover - I think that's it in terms of the regular rotation - there may of course be other special occasions from time-to-time.

For many years I "experimented" with different turkey recipes for the Thanksgiving feast. I tried different cooking techniques - covered/uncovered, basting/not basting, high heat/low heat. I tried free range turkeys, smaller turkeys, all the while refusing to go the butterball route with the industrial strength water infusion. Still, I was never happy with the finished product, and many years I swore I wouldn't even try turkey again. Then every year tradition would pull at my conscience and I go for the turkey again anyway.

A few years ago, I tried brining a turkey at home. Brining is simply soaking the turkey in a slatwater solution, which I will discuss in a little detail below. The results were OK - the turkey was less dry, but too salty. Not only that, but the the technique is quite cumbersome and messy. So I decided to try the kosher turkey route, since brining is basically part of the koshering process already, it was a ready-made, brined turkey. And it came out pretty good. It's still a little salty, perhaps I will try a little soaking before cooking might to draw out a little of the salt next year. It's mainly an issue when using the drippings to make gravy. That seems to concentrate the salt (makes sense, a lot of evaporation takes place in making gravy anyway) and leads to a salty gravy.

At first thought, brining seems a little counterintuitive. You might think that soaking a turkey in saltwater would cause water to diffuse out of the turkey (from higher concentration in the turkey meat to lower concentration in the saltwater solution) but apparently the process is a bit more complicated, and I'll summarize here, but you might want to click on the links to get more detailed in formation. Basically, it is true that the saltwater is a hypertonic solution, compared to the turkey, which should result in diffusion of water out of the turkey. But, at the same time, salt diffuses into the turkey meat. As a result, the salt starts to break down or denature proteins within the cell, increasing their water holding capacity, as well as their osmolarity (more solutes per unit water) - the relative concentrations of water then favor the diffusion of water into the turkey, and you get a moister piece of meat. This is my synthesis of the explanations offered by the two science-related websites below that discuss brining. Other explanations are offered on various food websites, mostly summarized in this Virtual Weber Bulletin Board article.

Links:

MadSci Network: How does brining a turkey before smoking make it juicier

Cooking for Engineers: Kitchen Notes: Brining

Now if I can just figure out a way to use this application of osmosis in a science lab activity...