Brine Cost Calculator: What a Batch Costs From Your Own Prices

Buy the salt in the biggest box you will use, because salt is most of the brine and keeps indefinitely; a plain kosher or pickling salt does the same job in a brine as any specialty salt. Skip sugar unless you want it, use whole spices you already have, and grow or freeze herbs. Above all, make only the brine the container needs: the calculator's presets are sized so the meat is covered with room to spare, not swimming.

Whichever plain salt costs least per gram where you shop, and the calculator works that out from the package price and weight you enter. Table and pickling salt are usually cheapest per gram, then Morton Coarse Kosher (1 lb canister or 3 lb box) and Diamond Crystal Kosher (3 lb box). Because the brine is set by weight, the cheaper salt gives the same result; only the spoons differ. Restaurant supply stores sell kosher salt in 25 to 50 lb bags for large projects.

For tap water, no. American Water's tap water page puts municipal water at about a penny a gallon or less, and the sample bill in the EPA's water bill guide works out to about 0.3 cents a gallon, which is nothing next to the salt. Leave the water price blank and the calculator ignores it. If you brine in bottled or filtered water, enter its price per gallon or liter and the water line fills in.

Work everything down to a price per gram: package price divided by package weight in grams. That is exactly what the salt and sugar rows on this page do, so a 3 lb box and a 25 lb bag can be compared by entering each in turn and reading the cost of the same batch. Remember that a bigger bag only saves money if you use it before it is a nuisance to store.

Not by reusing brine. Once raw meat has been in it the brine is contaminated, and USDA FSIS says to discard it after use; it is also the cheapest part of the meal. Cutting the salt below the percentage the brine calculators give you just under-brines the meat. Save money by sizing the batch to the container instead of the other way round, and by buying salt in a larger package.

Not for the brine itself. Himalayan pink, fleur de sel, and other finishing salts dissolve into the same sodium chloride solution as table salt, and the calculator's salt selector on the brine pages shows that the unrefined ones need to be weighed up for the water and minerals they carry, so they cost more and deliver less. Use them on the plate, where the texture shows, and brine with plain salt.

A 14 lb turkey in 2 gallons of 5% brine takes 379 g of salt, which is 28% of a 3 lb box, plus sugar at half the salt if you want it. So the brine costs about a quarter of whatever a box of kosher salt costs you, plus the aromatics. Load the 2 gallon preset, enter your box price, and the total is on the screen; the turkey itself is sized on the turkey brine calculator.

Restaurant supply stores and warehouse clubs for salt and sugar in bulk; ethnic grocery stores for whole spices, which are usually a fraction of the supermarket price per gram; and your own freezer for herbs bought on sale. Enter the package price and weight from each store into this calculator and the cost per batch tells you which one wins, because the sticker price alone does not.

This page remembers the prices you enter on this device, in your browser's storage, so they are back the next time you open it; the "Forget saved prices" control clears them. That is per device and per browser, not an account, and a private window keeps nothing. For a longer record, a note or spreadsheet with the price per gram from each store, updated when a price changes, is the simplest tool there is.

Dry brining, by a wide margin, because it uses only salt at under 1% of the meat's weight: a 14 lb turkey dry brines with about 42 g of Diamond Crystal (the turkey brine calculator's figure) against 379 g in a 2 gallon wet brine, about a tenth of the salt and no sugar, water, or bucket. Wet brining adds moisture to lean cuts and carries aromatics into the meat, so it earns its cost on chicken breasts and pork chops. The dry brine calculator sizes the dry version; the wet brine vs dry brine guide walks through the choice.