I’m a big fan of brining. For one thing, I hate fussing with meat once it’s gone in the oven. I have the burn marks on my hands to prove it. (Leather burn-proof fireplace gloves are now my go-to.) But I love succulent roast meat. I love roast chicken. I love roast Cornish game hens. I love pork chops. I’ve had my disappointments with all of these being dry as protein dust . . . until I discovered brining.
Brining, in short, is just mixing water with salt, sugar, and a few seasonings, and then immersing your meat of choice in same for a certain period of time. Then drying the meat and cooking it in the fashion of your choice. The advantage of brining is that the meat stays extra juicy—and all that without basting (for which I believe I’ve already expressed my distaste).
I find it irresistible as a cooking method. Especially my own favorite brine recipe, adapted, I believe, somewhere back in time, from an issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Mine goes something like this:
--Salt and sugar in a 1-to-1 ratio, dissolved in enough water to cover the meat in a noncorrosive container
--1 or 2 heads of unpeeled, smashed cloves of garlic
--A handful of crushed bay leaves
Occasionally I’ll add something like a few branches of fresh thyme, or a couple of sprigs of fresh sage or rosemary. But really, in the end, I like the classic basic brine the best. It’s that delectable flavor of garlic permeating every bite that I relish.
Here are my three favorite brining recipes:
--1 ½ cups salt (any kind)
--1 ½ cups sugar (any kind)
--2 heads unpeeled crushed garlic cloves
--8 to 10 crushed bay leaves
Dissolve in enough water to cover the chicken. Weight the chicken down so it’s submerged under the water. A plate with a weight on top works best here. Brine the bird for anywhere for three to four hours—don’t go over four, or the chicken will be too salty. Dry the chicken and roast your favorite way. (For a more detailed description of my favorite way, see p. 202)
--1 cup salt
--1 cup sugar
--1 head unpeeled crushed garlic cloves
--4 to 5 crushed bay leaves
Follow above directions for roast chicken. But only brine for three hours at the most.
--½ cup salt
--½ cup sugar
--1 head unpeeled crushed garlic cloves
--4 to 5 crushed bay leaves
I brined the thick ones overnight, because I wasn’t thinking too clearly, but it turned out well anyway. I would say, brine for at least two hours, and not more than eight. If you’re brining thin chops, definitely go for the shorter period. To cook the chops, put an oven rack in the lowest position. Preheat the oven as high as it will go—at least 500 degrees, 550 even better. Heat a cast iron, oven-proof pan big enough to hold the chops, either for three minutes over medium heat, or just do what I do and pop it into the oven until it’s really hot. Dry the chops and rub them with a little olive oil. Cook them in the pan in the oven for five minutes on each side.
This last recipe was a real breakthrough for me. I had been figuratively tearing my hair out trying to get a nice moist pork chop out of the defatted pork you get in the markets these days. But this did it. And I mean DID it. To the extent that, once I had savored one chop the first night, I then put the other away to eat later in the week. I added that one to a pot of braising sauerkraut, in theory for fifteen minutes before the kraut was to be served. But the reality was, well, I got busy doing other things, and didn’t get the pot out of the 325° oven till half an hour had passed. Oh well, I thought. Dry pork chop again. But to my delighted amazement, no. Pork chop was succulent as all get out, which was especially delightful eaten with lovely forkfuls of sauerkraut braised with onions and cumin in apple cider.
Yum.
The truth is, a little brine added to food prep is often a glorious thing. I like to salt my fish fillets, for example, and leave them for a half hour or so before they hit the sizzling pan. And it turns out—oh joy!—you can brine beans. Yes, after all these years of being told not to salt beans before they’re cooked, the people who look into these things tell us that, yes, if you salt them while they’re cooking, that does tend to toughen them. But if you soak them in a brine—say, three tablespoons for enough water to cover a pound of beans—and cook after draining and covering with fresh water, you get a tenderer bean.
I tried this myself. The flavor wasn’t any different between the unbrined and the brined, but it was definitely true that the latter came out more tender and creamy. Which was all to the good, yes?
Brining. It’s what’s for dinner. At my house, anyway.
Speaking of my roast chicken.
My roast chicken is simply the best, having been honed to perfection over years of tinkering. Tinkering and then eating. So you can trust me on this one.
I used to think Nigel Slater’s was the best. Simple. You just slathered a load of butter on a good organic bird, salt and pepper, maybe shove a garlic clove or two into the cavity, then roast it at 400° until done, still a tiny bit rose-colored at the joints, and gilded brown all over.
That’s a pretty good recipe, to tell the truth.
But then, as you know, I discovered brine.
The brined roast chicken. If you are into roast chicken (and I think we know by now I’m into it, yes?), this is the recipe for you.
Here’s how:
First . . . and most important . . . the bird. It should be organic, and the best quality you can get. No, really, I’m not kidding. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is not just so you don’t have to push out of your imagination the torture some poor Arkansas-bred creature went through to get broasted at Costco with so much paprika and cayenne that you can’t taste the fact that the bird itself is, well, tasteless. This is not just for hippie idealistic reasons (although, momentary commercial interlude, THE HIPPIES WERE RIGHT, okay? live with it). This is because most nonorganic birds have by now been so badly treated by techniques of mass production that they have just about no flavor. If we are going to eat meat, we need to understand that the higher morality is the higher practicality. In this as in so many other things.
Okay, now you have your bird. Take a brief moment to mourn the days when it would come stuffed with its own neck, giblets and liver, all of which come in very handy in the Good Eating Stakes. But never mind. We’ll get a good chicken broth out of the bones at the end, which is one of the advantages of roasting your own good chicken. (This is impossible with a supermarket rotisserie chicken. Take my word for it.)
Now you brine the bird. This may seem like a lot of hoopla, but there are times when hoopla adds so much to your quality of life that it cannot be avoided. This is one of those times.
Say you have a bird that’s about three to five pounds, the usual size you find in the market. For a good brine, it should soak about three hours. You can do more if you like a brinier bird (which I do). Not more than six hours, though—too salty at that point. (And if I say it’s too salty, believe me . . .)
Here’s how you make the divine brine:
Mix
1 ½ cups of salt (just table is fine) with
1 ½ cups of sugar (here, if anywhere, is the proper use for white) in
A gallon of water (or as much as it will take to cover the bird)
Crush into the liquid a handful of BAY LEAVES (as many or as few as you can spare)
Squash a head or two (two is better) of garlic and add the cloves, even with the skin still clinging to them as all we want is the flavor, you’re not going to eat them. This is a very important step. It adds a dimension to the chicken that is way out.
Now submerge your bird. Refrigerate. From time to time, turn the bird over in the brine. Don’t fuss about this—just when you think of it is fine. And if you don’t think of it, that’s fine, too.
An hour and a half or so before you want to eat the bird, preheat the oven to 400°. If you want, do what I do: plan to cook the bird in a ridged cast iron pan. In which case, put the pan in the preheating oven to preheat itself.
While all this is going on, drain the bird (garlic cloves and bay leaves can go happily on the compost), dry it off with paper towels, inside and out. If you’re not going to use the cast iron option, put the bird breast down on a rack in a roasting pan.
When the oven is hot (and so is your ridged cast iron pan, if you’re with me on this one), add the bird breast side down. It’s going to take about an hour to cook, but I like to leave it upside down for the first twenty minutes.
After twenty minutes, turn it right side up. No need to baste. The brine does something magic to the chicken so you don’t have to bother.
Roast for about forty more minutes, though I would check it at thirty. If you have an instant read thermometer (and really, you should), the dark meat joint, where the thigh attaches to the bird, should read a little under 180 degrees when it’s done to my idea of perfection. You’ll have your own ideas, of course.
Take the bird out, let it sit (under a tent of foil if you must, but I usually just leave it out so the crispy skin stays that way) for five or ten or fifteen minutes. Then carve.
Then eat. Then oooh. Then aaahhh.
And if you’ve roasted a few carrots, perhaps even a few potatoes, in the same oven, have them on the side. By the way, I generally serve my portion on top of shredded lettuce, with a little wedge of lemon for possible squeezing.
This is truly the Greatest Roast Chicken in the world. And here’s the other advantage it has over those Costco rotisserie chickens: as you eat, throw the bones into a pot with a scrubbed carrot, a bit of celery and parsley if you have them, a couple of garlic cloves, a bay leaf, and a peppercorn or two. Cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer. As you eat the chicken, add the bones to the soup. Or save all the bones in a bag in the freezer and make the soup later. Either way, simmer everything together until it smells beautifully like chicken broth (at least an hour, but more won’t hurt), and then cool, drain, use or freeze. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that brined birds can’t make good broth. I don’t know where they got that idea. From some unsalted galaxy far far away, no doubt.
When you’re ready to set about making your soup, you can do this a number of ways.
You can
--boil the broth, add a touch of soy sauce and a hit of sesame oil, stir in an egg or two, top with chopped scallions, and breathe in the goodness of a real Eggdrop Soup.
--add vegetables at will, chopped carrot and celery and mushroom, a bit more onion, finish off with a dollop of butter. Minced parsley scattered on top is nice.
--add cooked noodles, or cooked rice, let them soak up some chicken goodness, and serve. Minced leftover chicken if you have some.
--add thinly sliced onions that have been sweated in butter, and more minced garlic than you think you need. Minced cilantro is good added at the last minute. (This one is perfect when you have a cold. I personally have tested it in my home kitchen, under extreme virus conditions.)
Do I need to add ‘salt and pepper to taste’? Surely not. We must know each other well enough by now to leave the obvious unspoken.
Happy eating. Safety, warmth, creativity, and good food are my wishes for us all. That might be obvious, but I like saying it out loud anyway.
(By the way, once you have that broth and some leftover chicken, if you don’t feel like soup, you can make chicken pot pie without the crust.
First with the broth, make a béchamel. Essentially the same as how you make a cheese sauce for macaroni and cheese, except a.) you don’t use cheese, and b.) you can use half milk, half chicken broth . . . or whatever mix appeals to you that day.
In other words, say for a whole leftover chicken breast: sauté four tablespoons of butter and four tablespoons of flour. Add two cups of milk and or/chicken broth in whatever proportions you feel like that day. Simmer until it tastes good. Salt and pepper to taste. Add a slug of sherry if you have it, and a glug of cream.
Now . . . mix with the cooked chicken—torn, diced, or sliced, your call—in that buttered casserole. Add a handful of frozen peas, if you like. You can add some diced cooked carrot, though I usually don’t. Top with something crunchy. I use a mix of bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese, but you can use toasted sliced almonds, toasted pecan pieces. You get the idea.
Bake at 350° until bubbling and browned along the edges.
There you have it. Chicken pot pie without the pie. A lagniappe to that roast chicken.)
