Replace half the water in your brine with ice

The adults’ kitchenThe adults’ kitchenWelcome to The Grown-Up Kitchen, the Skillet series created to answer your most basic culinary questions and fill in any gaps that may be missing from your home chef education.

If you are planning to bake a big old turkey or one cauliflower head, a good brine ensures that the final product is soft, moist and tasty. Simple pickles are little more than sugar, salt and water, but peppercorns, citrus zest, bay leaves and all sorts of plant parts can be used to make things more interesting. A universal truth about pickles, however, is that you must heat the liquid to get the crystalline solids in solution.

If your brine is intended for meat, it must be cooled completely before your pork chop, turkey breast or shrimp troupe is submerged in these salty and sugary waters. You can wait for that to happen or use some ice.

Of course, you can’t just pour a lot of ice into your brine; this will change its proportions and dilute its flavors. Instead, divide the amount of water required by your recipe in half, use This one volume to dissolve the salt and sugar, then add the rest of the water as ice. The ice cools the brine as it melts, bringing it to the correct temperature and volume.

You will – I’m sorry for that – having to do a small amount of math to calculate the correct amount of ice. The water expands as it freezes, which means that a cup of ice is not the same as a cup of liquid water. Fortunately, a milliliter of water weighs a gram at room temperature, so all you have to do is count your milliliters, convert to grams and weigh that amount of grams of ice. Let’s use this very simple brine recipe to illustrate:

Basic brine from myrecipes:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of salt
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 2 rooms of cold water
• 3 bay leaves

The recipe instructs you to add all the ingredients to the pan and heat to dissolve the sugar and salt and then wait for the brine to cool completely before proceeding. To speed up the process with ice, put the salt, sugar and leaves in the pan with a single liter of water and heat, dissolving everything but the leaves.

Then add the ice. A liter of water weighs 946 grams, so take an ice bag and weigh 946 grams of ice. Add to the brine, stir to dissolve and cool, and dip the meat. You don’t have to wait.