How to Brine a Whole Chicken

I’ve done a series of experiments to find out how best to brine a whole chicken. What kind of salt should you use? Do you boil the water first? And, most importantly, how long does a whole chicken need to brine for? I’ve tested it all and have the answers for you here!

No dry, tasteless roast chicken here! I’ve done all the testing for you, so you can cook your best chicken dinner ever. Brining a chicken is quicker and easier than you think. Once you’ve experienced it, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start doing this sooner!

Scroll down to read more about how it all comes together or click here to jump straight down to the recipe.

How Does Brining Work?

Brining is simply soaking your meat in a salt water solution before cooking it. It’s been debated in the culinary literature about what is actually happening here, and scientific words like osmosis and diffusion are used quite a bit. But what we do know is that using a brine changes meat in three ways:

1. Meats soak up salt water more easily than plain water. Therefore, what you’re doing is adding moisture to the meat, which, once it’s cooked, makes the meat itself seem moister.
2. The salt changes the texture of the meat. It’s a type of denaturing. So, meat that is brined also has a more tender texture. If you think of the difference between processed chicken breast (like chicken breast lunchmeats) versus regular cooked chicken, it’s similar to that difference.
3. Brining essentially seasons right inside the meat. That’s because the meat is soaking up the salted water, so salt ends up all the way inside. This is something marinades can’t do (unless they contain salt).

All of that is going on and the result is meat (or your whole chicken, in this case) that is juicier, more tender, and more flavorful. It’s a win-win-win! You can read more about the science behind brining and the osmosis debate here.

Note: There is another way that you can brine chicken and other cuts of meat. It’s called dry-brining and doesn’t use water. Instead, you sprinkle the meat/poultry with salt and leave it uncovered in the fridge. It’s actually a very convenient technique to learn, but is not what we’re talking about here today. If you’d like to learn more about dry brining, head over here. Note that dry brining is especially useful for large pieces of meat, like turkey, since you don’t need to find a large container to hold them and the water. Learn how to dry brine a turkey here. But it’s also wonderful for more juicy cuts that don’t require the water, but just the flavor, which is why I ALWAYS dry brine my steaks like this. Similarly, juicy chicken thighs can be either dry-brined or wet-brined like this.

Essential Brine Ingredients

Salt and water are the only required ingredients in a brine. Sometimes additional seasonings or sugar are added as well. I used a double batch of my standard brine recipe for each of the tests, which yields 8 cups of brine and is enough one 3-5 pound whole chicken.

The brine recipe used here is essentially: 8 cups of cold water and 12 tablespoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt OR 9 tablespoons Morton’s kosher salt OR 6 tablespoons fine or table salt.

Next we’ll discuss why the salt amounts that I just gave you are different from each other. And then in the “Do You Boil The Brine” section, I talk about adding other ingredients to the brine and how best to do so (Hint: It does not involve boiling anything!).

Type of Salt to Use

Note that it really matters what kind of salt you have and how much you use. The salt crystals in the three types of salt listed are of different sizes and if you use the incorrect type or incorrect amount, you’ll end up with a brine that is either way too salty or not salty enough.

To make the brine, all you need to do is mix together the salt and cool or room temperature water. It’s a large amount of salt though so it can take a minute or two for it to dissolve. It will though. Just stir it together and keep stirring until it’s less cloudy and there’s no more salt undissolved at the bottom.

We’re going to discuss adding other ingredients to the brine in a moment. I’m just going to say here though that if you want to add any seasonings straight to the brine, do it after the salt has dissolved. That’s because other ingredients can make the mixture cloudy and then you can’t tell as well if the salt has fully dissolved or not.

I promise that the amount of salt given in the recipe will dissolve in the amount of water listed, even if the water is fridge cold. And so, I tend to just use the cool tap water or filtered water, dissolve in the salt, and then add some garlic powder and/or onion powder for extra flavor. Those powders do really seem to penetrate. Note that you should add these powders after dissolving the salt. If you add them first, it makes the water cloudy and it’s then hard to tell if the salt has dissolved or not

Adding Flavor To Your Chicken Brine

If I want to add more flavor, I’ve developed a technique that REALLY gets flavor into the chicken without requiring you to boil the water. I get so excited when I tell people about this. It’s just so cool. What you do is to take some fresh herbs and uncooked aromatics (for instance, fresh parsley, fresh rosemary, a quartered onion, and a few cloves of garlic) and you put those into a blender or food processor with some of the water for your brine and all of the salt. Then really pulverize that mixture, pureeing all the ingredients really well. Then transfer it all to your brining container along with the rest of the water and stir to combine well.

That brine now has such extreme flavor in it. Think of it like the difference between a mug of cranberry tea, versus pureeing actual cranberries with water. The first is steeping, the second is a flavor slurry like our brine. That is now your ultra-flavorful brining mixture and the flavors really do penetrate into the meat, no boiling and cooling required.

To learn more about this technique and for the recipe, head over to my amazing turkey brine recipe. That one makes 16 cups, so you’ll just halve it to use on a chicken.

Experiment Results: How Long To Brine a Whole Chicken

For this part of the brining experiments, I wanted to compare whole chickens that had been brined for different amounts of time. As mentioned, the brining solution I used for testing is my standard brine recipe, with cold tap water. I’ve also done similar tests for brining chicken breasts, brining chicken thighs, brining pork chops, as well as brining pork loin, and my pork tenderloin brine, so make sure to take a look at those results as well.

In the chart below, I share the results of testing the brine for various times. The chickens were all 4 pounds in size. After brining, the chickens were not rinsed. They were patted dry and then they were cooked at 350°F with no added ingredients until they reached 160°F in the middle of the breast and thigh using an instant-read thermometer. The chickens were then allowed to rest for 30 minutes. The breast, thigh, drumstick, and wing meat was tasted by two blind tasters (people who did not know how long each chicken had been brined) and by me (I did know how long, but tried to be open-minded about what I was tasting and what I liked best). Here are the results:

Chart: Roasted Whole Chicken Texture and Flavor After Different Amounts of Time in Brine

Brining Time	Results
1 hour	Mildly salted flavor, no change in texture or juiciness.
2 hours	Mildly salted flavor throughout, slightly more tender and juicy, especially in the breast meat.
4 hours	Perfectly seasoned, juicy, tender, noticeably more tender and juicy on all pieces.
6 hours	Well-seasoned (maybe even too salty for some tastes), more tender and more juicy throughout.
8 hours	Too salty for many people, but definitely more tender and juicy.

You’ll see that the sweet spot for brining is between 4-6 hours. Now, I know that a lot of recipes have you brine the chicken for 12 hours or overnight, so my results may be surprising. However, not all brines contain the same amount of salt and so they have different effects. Here, I’ve used a standard brine recipe that is found in many cookbooks and that I’ve used to test on a variety of cuts of meat, as noted earlier. And these are the results for this brine recipe. If your brine has less salt, then it may need more time.

How To Cook A Whole Chicken After Brining

You can cook the chicken however you normally would. You can roast the chicken like this, or cut the chicken into parts to cook in your favorite recipes. I love to break the chicken into parts and then cook it slowly and finish it on the grill or under the broiler like this.

Note that if you cook the brined chicken in any kind of liquid (like a soup or stew) the salt can leech out into the liquid and make the dish salty. I therefore don’t recommend using a brined chicken for these purposes.

Gravy For A Brined Chicken

If you’re roasting the chicken and want to have gravy with it, it’s important to know that the drippings that come out of a brined whole chicken can be overly salty. I therefore advise that you make this gravy without drippings recipe, using low-salt stock and do not add any salt to it.

Then, after roasting your brined chicken, taste the drippings. If they are not overly salty, you can add them to the gravy that you’ve made, and then season the gravy to taste. If those drippings are salty though, only add a little bit of the drippings to your gravy at a time, tasting the gravy as you add. Stop adding drippings when the gravy has enough flavor and is salted sufficiently from the drippings. In this way, you’re using your salty drippings as the salt for the gravy, see?

I hope you’ve learned everything you need to know about brining whole chickens. If I missed anything or you have any questions, please ask in the comments below. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible!