Old ways
Brine and Dry-Cure Salt Calculator
Enter the weight of the meat, the water and the strength you want. You get the salt by weight and in spoons of the salt in your cupboard, for a wet brine, an equilibrium brine or a dry brine.
A gallon of water takes about 189 grams of salt, 6.7 ounces, for a 5 percent brine. That is 10½ tablespoons of table salt, 12½ of Morton kosher or 1⅜ cups of Diamond Crystal, and the gap between those three is why a brine measured in cups goes wrong so often. For an equilibrium brine, weigh the meat and the water together and add 1.5 percent of that total as salt. For a dry brine, rub on about 1 percent of the meat's weight, roughly 4.5 grams per pound. The calculator below does the arithmetic for your own cut, and the meat stays at 40°F or colder the whole time.
Spoon measures in the result come from the published weight of a cup of each salt, so they are close and not exact. A kitchen scale that reads in grams takes the guessing out of every method on this page.
How the calculator works
All three methods use the same idea. Salt is weighed against something else, and the percent tells you how much. What changes is the thing it is weighed against.
A wet brine here is salt as a percent of the water's weight. A gallon of water weighs about 3,785 grams, so 5 percent is 189 grams. Some writers give brine strength as a percent of the finished solution, salt plus water, and at kitchen strengths the two barely differ: 5 percent of the water is 4.8 percent of the solution. The meat's weight does not enter into it, because the meat comes out before it takes up all the salt the water holds. Time does the controlling, which is why wet brine recipes always give hours.
An equilibrium brine weighs the salt against the meat and the water together. Destination BBQ's brining math page sets it out: pick the saltiness you want the finished meat to have, multiply it by the combined weight, and add exactly that much salt. Given time, salt spreads until the meat and the liquid hold the same share, and then it stops. The same page puts the useful range at 1.2 to 1.8 percent, with 1.5 a good start. The calculator uses that simple product. The exact mass balance divides it by one minus the percent, which at 1.5 percent adds about 1.5 percent more salt, a pinch on a turkey.
A dry brine is salt as a percent of the meat alone, rubbed on the surface and left to soak in. The calculator gives the total and the amount per pound, so you can scale it to any cut. About 1 percent seasons a roast or a bird the way most cooks expect. Two percent tastes noticeably salty and leans toward ham.
The spoon measures come from published weights per cup: about 288 grams for table salt, 241 for Morton kosher and 137 for Diamond Crystal, as listed in MasterClass's salt conversion chart. Table salt at 18 grams a tablespoon matches the figure on Dad Cooks Dinner's salt-by-weight tests. Coarse sea salt and pickling salt vary by brand, so weigh those.
Salt to water ratio for a wet brine
These are the amounts for one gallon of water. Halve them for two quarts, double them for two gallons.
| Strength | Weight | Table salt | Morton | Diamond |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3% | 4 oz | 6½ tbsp | 7½ tbsp | 13½ tbsp |
| 5% | 6.7 oz | 10½ tbsp | 12½ tbsp | 1⅜ cups |
| 6% | 8 oz | 12½ tbsp | 15 tbsp | 1⅝ cups |
| 7.5% | 10 oz | 1 cup | 1⅛ cups | 2 cups |
The old rule of a cup of table salt to a gallon of water sits at the bottom row. It is what Illinois Extension's turkey brine works out to, written as 2 cups of table salt or 4 cups of kosher in 2 gallons, with 6 to 8 hours in the refrigerator, or overnight if you cut the salt and sugar by half. A strong brine like that is meant for a short soak. A weaker brine at 3 to 5 percent can go longer before the meat turns salty, which suits a cook who wants to start the bird the night before and not get up at 4 a.m. to pull it.
Sugar is optional in any of these and does not change the salt math. It browns the skin and softens the salt's edge. Herbs, garlic, peppercorns and cider are flavor and nothing more.
Why the kind of salt changes the answer
Table salt grains are small, dense cubes that pack with little air between them. Morton kosher is flattened flakes that pack fairly tight. Diamond Crystal is hollow, fragile crystals with a lot of air between them. A cup of each therefore holds very different amounts of salt: table salt weighs about twice as much as Diamond Crystal, cup for cup, and Morton sits in between, closer to table salt.
That turns into real trouble when a recipe says "kosher salt" and stops. Take Illinois's 4 cups of kosher salt in 2 gallons. In Diamond Crystal that is about 7 percent, right where it should be. In Morton it comes to nearly 13 percent, close to twice as salty, and a turkey left in it for the full time comes out tasting cured. If you know which brand a recipe was written for, use it. If you do not, weigh 7.5 percent of the water and ignore the cup.
Iodized table salt works in a brine. Some cooks taste the iodine in long soaks, and the anti-caking agents can cloud the water, which does no harm. Pickling and canning salt is pure and fine-grained and weighs close to table salt by volume, but brands differ enough that a scale is the better measure.
Equilibrium brining: salt you cannot overdo
The trouble with a plain wet brine is that it never stops working. Leave a chicken in 7 percent brine for two days and it keeps taking salt until it tastes like ham. An equilibrium brine solves that by putting in only the salt you want in the finished meat. Once the meat and the water share it evenly, there is no more to take.
That makes it the forgiving choice when timing is uncertain: a power cut that delays the oven, a smoker that will not hold temperature, a bird that thawed a day early. What you give up is speed: salt moves slowly through thick meat, so a whole turkey or a pork shoulder needs days to get close to even, where a strong brine seasons the outside in hours. For poultry the USDA's two-day limit, below, still applies whichever method you use, so a thick bird in an equilibrium brine will not quite reach the balance point. It will still be evenly seasoned through the outer inch and never too salty.
Use as little water as covers the meat. A tight container or a heavy food-grade bag lets you use less water, and every pound of water you leave out is salt the meat does not have to share.
Dry brine salt per pound
At 1 percent, a pound of meat takes 4.5 grams of salt. In spoons that is ¾ teaspoon of table salt, a scant teaspoon of Morton kosher or 1½ teaspoons of Diamond Crystal. Thick roasts and whole birds do well at 0.75 to 1 percent. Lean chops and steaks can go to 1.25 percent if you like them well seasoned.
Dry brining works in two stages. The salt first draws juice to the surface, then dissolves into it, and that salty liquid is drawn back into the meat over the following day. The skin dries out as it goes, which is why Clemson Extension's turkey guide credits dry brining with browner, crisper skin and less room taken up in the refrigerator, at the cost of more time. Its dry brine recipe is ¼ cup of kosher salt with sugar, sage, thyme, pepper and garlic powder, rubbed under the skin, on top and in the cavity, then covered and refrigerated for 24 to 48 hours. On a 14-pound bird, ¼ cup of Morton is about 1 percent. The same cup of Diamond Crystal is a little over half that.
Spread the salt evenly. A dry brine that lands in clumps makes salty patches and bland ones, so measure the total, mix it with any sugar and herbs, and sprinkle it from a height the way you would season a steak. Leave the meat uncovered or loosely covered on a rack for the last day if you want the skin dry.
How much salt to brine a turkey
Take a 14-pound thawed turkey. Clemson gives the amount of brine by size: about 2 quarts for a turkey breast or a bird under 12 pounds, 1 gallon for 12 to 14 pounds and 2 gallons for 16 to 20. It times them at 6 to 8 hours for the small ones, 12 hours for 12 to 14 pounds and 12 to 24 hours for the big ones.
- Wet brine at 5 percent in 1 gallon: 3,785 × 0.05 = 189 grams. Measured in fine table salt, that is 10½ level tablespoons. Brine it for about 12 hours.
- Equilibrium brine at 1.5 percent: the bird weighs 6,350 grams and the water 3,785, so 10,135 × 0.015 = 152 grams, about 8½ tablespoons of table salt or 1 cup and 2 tablespoons of Diamond Crystal. It can sit the full two days without turning salty.
- Dry brine at 1 percent: 6,350 × 0.01 = 64 grams. That is about ¼ cup of Morton kosher or ½ cup of Diamond Crystal, rubbed on and left 24 to 48 hours.
Read the label before you start. A turkey sold as "enhanced", "basted" or "self-basting", or one that says it contains a percentage of a solution, has already had salt water pumped into it. Brining that bird again makes it too salty. Kosher turkeys are salted during processing for the same reason, and they need no brine at all.
After any brine, take the bird out, blot it dry and cook it to 165°F in the thickest part of the breast, the thigh and the stuffing, read with a food thermometer. Clemson adds 12 to 24 hours uncovered in the refrigerator after a wet brine if you want crisp skin.
Keep it at 40°F or colder
Salt at brining strength seasons meat and does not preserve it. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service says to brine poultry in the refrigerator, fully submerged and covered, in food-grade plastic, stainless steel or glass, and never in a trash bag. It allows poultry up to 2 days in the brine. Its Thanksgiving guidance keeps the turkey and the brine at 40°F or below the whole time, because bacteria grow fast between 40 and 140°F and food left in that range for 2 hours, or 1 hour above 90°F, is unsafe.
A big bird in two gallons of brine rarely fits in a home refrigerator, and in an outage the refrigerator may not be running at all. The old answer was the season: hogs were killed and meat salted when the weather turned cold. A cooler can stand in, with rules:
- Chill the brine before the meat goes in. Dissolve the salt in part of the water, hot if you like, then make up the rest with cold water or ice.
- Count ice as water. A pound of ice is a little under a pint, so weigh it or measure it into the water total, or the brine ends up weaker than you meant.
- Keep ice in sealed bags or frozen jugs on top so the brine does not keep diluting as it melts.
- Put a probe thermometer in the brine, not in the air of the cooler, and read it every few hours. Above 40°F, add ice.
- A cold porch or an unheated shed works on nights that stay between freezing and 40°F. A warm afternoon undoes it.
Brine that has had raw meat in it carries that meat's bacteria. Pour it out when you are done, wash the container with hot soapy water, and keep the cooler away from anything you will eat raw.
When brining turns into curing
Every method above seasons meat for the next few days. A brined turkey or a dry-brined pork shoulder is fresh meat with salt in it, and it is cooked and eaten or refrigerated within a few days. Curing is a different job: salt at far higher levels, held for weeks, so the meat keeps without cold storage. Country ham, salt pork, bacon and corned beef are cures, and so is any sausage that is dried rather than cooked.
For that work, a calculator is not enough, and this one does not try. A long cure needs a tested recipe that sets the salt, the cure, the temperature, the days per inch of thickness and the drying conditions together. Our guide to preserving meat with salt, smoke and lard walks through Virginia Tech's country ham method, which uses 8 pounds of salt and 2 of sugar per 100 pounds of pork and keeps the meat at 36 to 40°F for the cure, and explains why Mississippi State will not recommend aging dry-cured meat at home in a warm, humid climate.
Most cures also call for curing salt, which is ordinary salt mixed with sodium nitrite. Prague Powder #1, the common one, is 6.25 percent sodium nitrite and dyed pink so nobody mistakes it for table salt. Nitrite protects against botulism in meat that sits for days in conditions where those bacteria could grow, which is why it shows up in bacon, smoked sausage and corned beef. It is also poisonous in excess. Michigan State University Extension lists the legal limits for nitrite in cured meat, from 120 parts per million in pumped bacon up to 625 for dry-cured products, and those small numbers show how little room for error there is. Weigh curing salt to the gram the recipe gives, from a recipe that names the product it was tested with, and never swap Prague Powder #2, which also contains nitrate and is made for long dry cures, for #1.
If you want to add pink salt to a brine for ham or corned beef, take the amount from the recipe or the package directions, and use this calculator for the plain salt only.
My take
I would buy a cheap digital kitchen scale before any more salt, and do every brine by weight. It removes the brand problem completely and lets a cook repeat a result. For a holiday turkey I would dry brine at 1 percent for two days: no bucket to fit in the refrigerator, crisp skin, and a bird that tastes seasoned all the way through. When the timing is shaky, as it is when the power is out and cooking depends on the wood stove, I would switch to an equilibrium brine at 1.5 percent, because nothing goes wrong if dinner is a day late. The strong cup-a-gallon brine I would keep for chops and chicken pieces that soak for an hour or two. And anything meant to hang in a smokehouse or sit in a crock for weeks gets a tested recipe and weighed curing salt, every time.
Sources
- USDA FSIS: Poultry basting, brining and marinating
- USDA FSIS: Safe handling for Thanksgiving
- Clemson Cooperative Extension: How to brine a turkey, wet and dry brining
- University of Illinois Extension: Brine method
- Michigan State University Extension: Additives have legal limits in cured meat products
- Destination BBQ: Brining math explained
- MasterClass: Salt conversion chart
- Dad Cooks Dinner: Salt by weight
