How to Make Brine

What is great meat or seafood without brine? I bet it can’t be imagined. Brine adds a lot of great and amazing flavor to poultry, meats, and seafood. One of the biggest contradictions we have about brine for sale is that they involve a very complex process to produce when in an actual sense it doesn’t. Brine is simply just salt in water. Most people find this truth about brine a bit shocking. Its content may look simple, yet it does a lot of amazing things to meats, poultry, seafood, and meals entirely. Aside from the fact that it adds a lot of flavor to proteins, it is also used as a tenderizer.  Here is how the brine you buy from the grocery store can be made at home.

Often, brines are described in percentage. This percentage is referred to as the ratio of salt to the water.  So it’s up to you to determine the percentage of brine you want to prepare.  So let’s say you want to make a 7 percent brine, the first thing to do is to put the meat or seafood you want to use in a container that will be used to carry out the entire process and get it covered with water. Ensure your protein of choice is well submerged into the water. When you are sure that the protein is well submerged, you remove it from the container and weigh the water in the container then calculate the percentage.  Let’s assume the water is 1 liter after measurement, and then 7 percent brine would mean adding 70g of salt to the water.  Most brine made for sale is usually within the range of 5 percent to 10 percent. But for this recipe, the focus will be on preparing 10 percent brine.

Here are the ingredients used in the preparation of 10 percent brine:

• 3 liters of water
• 200g of sugar
• 300g of salt
• 10 peppercorns
• 10-star anise
• 10 coriander seed
• 10 juniper berries
• 3 bay leaves
• 3 sprigs of thyme
• 1 lemon zest
• I orange  zest

Procedures

• Put a dry pan on a stove and allow it to get hot. Then add all the dry spices to the hot dry pan and allow to toast lightly until fragrant.
• Then you add sugar and salt to the pan. Then follow suit with the bay leaves, thyme, lemon zest, orange zest, and 1 liter of the water and allow it to come to a boil. 
• Keep stirring until the sugar and salt dissolve completely, and then remove the pan from the heat.
• After removing the pan from the heat, add the other 2 liters of water remaining. This will help cool the brine down. Ensure you keep the brine refrigerated until it is chilled before you get to use it.
• Put the meat or seafood into the brine and keep it in the fridge till when you need it.

Preparation of brine is as easy as that. Anyone can try this at home.