Salt Water Brine Calculator: Salt and Sugar for Any Wet Brine

Because the calculator can only turn grams into spoons if it knows which salt is in the spoon. A cup of table salt weighs 288 g, a cup of Morton Coarse Kosher 230 g, and a cup of Diamond Crystal 134 g (each maker's label, scaled up), so a recipe written in cups delivers more than twice the salt with table salt as with Diamond Crystal. The grams of salt for a 5% brine never change; only the volume does. Pick the salt you have and the spoons come out right, or skip the spoons and weigh it.

Yes, by weight, with no adjustment: 189 g is 189 g. By volume, 1 cup of table salt is about 1 1/4 cups of Morton Coarse Kosher or about 2 1/8 cups of Diamond Crystal, and going the other way you use less. Select the new salt in the calculator and it redoes the spoons for you; the salt conversion calculator converts a whole recipe.

Morton is 230 g per cup (label: 1.2 g per 1/4 teaspoon) and Diamond Crystal is 134 g per cup (label: 0.7 g per 1/4 teaspoon), so a cup of Morton carries 1.72 times the salt. The old rule of thumb that Morton is twice as dense overshoots; use the table on this page. Both are plain sodium chloride, both dissolve fully in a brine, and both work at the same grams.

At 5% salt to water: shrimp 30 to 60 minutes; chicken breasts and pieces 1 to 2 hours (at 6%); a whole chicken 4 to 6 hours; pork chops 2 to 4 hours; a pork loin 8 to 14 hours at 3.5% (Morton's overnight rule); a whole turkey 12 to 24 hours at 3.5 to 5%, sized on the turkey brine calculator. Never past 24 hours for any wet brine, and at 6% and above stay at the short end. The times come from Morton's brining guide, The Kitchn's quick brine, and Destination BBQ's brining chart, with a few rows set by this site where those sources give none.

Yes. Past its time the meat keeps taking up salt and the texture turns spongy, then mushy; shrimp go that way in about an hour, a chicken breast in a few. When it happens, rinse well, skip added salt in cooking, and shorten the next batch. If in doubt, brine short: an under-brined chicken is still a good chicken, an over-brined one is ham.

A quick rinse under cold water and a thorough pat dry. The rinse takes the surface salt off so the outside is not saltier than the inside; the drying is what lets the skin brown. Leave a whole chicken uncovered on a rack in the refrigerator for an hour or more after patting and the skin crisps better still.

5% of the water weight for most cuts: 47 g per quart, 189 g per gallon. Use 3.5% for an overnight brine on a large piece and 6% for a short brine of 1 to 2 hours on pieces. Morton's guide lands in the same band: 1 cup of Morton Coarse Kosher per gallon is about 6.1% for 4 to 5 hours, and 1/2 cup per gallon is about 3% overnight. Above 6% keep the time short; above 12% you are into preservation brines, not a wet brine for dinner. Sauerkraut (2% of the vegetable weight) and equilibrium brines (1.5% of meat plus water) are different calculations with their own pages.

No. Once raw meat or poultry has been in it, the brine carries whatever the meat carried, and boiling it is not a fix. Pour it out and mix fresh; salt is the cheapest thing in the kitchen.

Because bacteria grow fastest between 40°F and 140°F (4 to 60°C), the range USDA FSIS calls the danger zone, and warm brine holds the meat there for hours. Chill the brine to 40°F (4°C) or below before the meat goes in. The quickest way is to dissolve the salt in a third of the water, hot, then add the rest as cold water and ice by weight so the percentage stays put.

Enough to submerge the meat with room to spare, which is usually 1.5 to 2 times the meat's weight in water when the container fits snugly. A 4 lb chicken in a gallon of brine is at 2.1 times; four pork chops sit in half a gallon. A brining bag needs less than a stockpot. Enter the meat weight in the calculator and it reports the ratio for the water you chose; the container size calculator picks the vessel.

For poultry and pork, most cooks do; for shrimp, skip it. The calculator's default is sugar at half the weight of the salt (95 g in a gallon at 5%), which matches The Kitchn's quick brine of 2 tablespoons of sugar to 4 tablespoons of kosher salt per quart. It rounds the salt's edge and helps the skin brown; it does not change the salt percentage. Brown sugar, maple sugar, and honey work by the same weight.

You can; it dissolves and it brines. Iodized salt can leave a faint flavor some people notice and a slight cloudiness from the anti-caking agent, so pickling salt or a kosher salt is the usual choice. Whichever you use, pick the table salt row in the calculator (288 g per cup, 6 g per teaspoon) so the spoons are right.

Yes. The meat is seasoned through, so salt nothing else that touches it: no salt in the rub, none on the skin, and go light on a pan sauce or gravy made from the drippings. Pepper, herbs, and sugar in a rub are fine. Taste before you season anything made from the juices.

A wet brine soaks the meat in salt water, this page's calculation; a dry brine rubs salt straight onto the meat at about 0.6 to 0.9% of its weight and lets it sit uncovered in the refrigerator. Wet brining adds water to lean cuts (chicken breast, pork loin) and takes a big container; dry brining takes no space, concentrates flavor, and gives crisper skin. The wet brine vs dry brine guide walks through the choice, and the dry brine calculator does the other math.

Yes, and they do not change the salt math. Whole peppercorns, bay leaves, crushed garlic, thyme or rosemary sprigs, juniper berries, and mustard seed are the usual ones; the flavor additions list on this page scales them to your water. Use whole spices, not ground, so the brine stays clear, and simmer them in part of the water for a few minutes if you want more from them, then chill the brine before the meat goes in.

Because no maker publishes a gram figure for them. Table salt, Morton, Diamond Crystal, Redmond, and Celtic grey have a nutrition label with grams per 1/4 teaspoon, so their cup weights are the label scaled up. Fine sea salt, Himalayan pink, and flake salts have no such figure, so their weights come from a test kitchen's scale and are worded "roughly". For those salts, the gram figure is the one to use, on a scale.