# Acounting for Sodium in Brine



## OddCooker (Dec 4, 2008)

I've taken a shine to the brine thanks to a wonderful thanksgiving turkey and some very juicy chicken breasts.  But my breasts came out a bit salty for my taste, how do you control for this? also how do you count the salt in the food after brining, they were salty but not half cup of kosher salt for 5 chicken breasts salty! how much salt will I be eating if I stick with the brine?

The chicken I just cubed and tossed with some unsalted Endame, came out perfect.


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## GB (Dec 4, 2008)

If your chicken breasts came out too salty then you have two options. You could decrease the amount of salt in your brine or you could decrease the amount of time the chicken is in the brine. Actually there is a third option where you do a little of option one and option two. Be careful decreasing the amount of salt in the brine if you go that route though as there does come a point were you just do not have enough salt to actually do the job.

I do not know how you would measure the amount of salt you are ingesting.


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## bbally (Dec 4, 2008)

OddCooker said:


> I've taken a shine to the brine thanks to a wonderful thanksgiving turkey and some very juicy chicken breasts. But my breasts came out a bit salty for my taste, how do you control for this? also how do you count the salt in the food after brining, they were salty but not half cup of kosher salt for 5 chicken breasts salty! how much salt will I be eating if I stick with the brine?
> 
> The chicken I just cubed and tossed with some unsalted Endame, came out perfect.


 
Saltiness can be controlled by time... but depth of penetration suffers with the time method.

You can adjust the amount of salt in a brine, but rate of osmosis suffers.

Best to use what we call freshening in the curing world.  Placing the breasts in ice water for a specific period of time after they are removed from the saline.

Calculating the salt you are eating is not easy.

You must check the (Specific Gravity) SG of the brine.  Then weight how much the brine weighs.

Then check the weight of the brine after the breasts have been removed.  And check the SG of the remaining brine.  Then do the mol count change calculation, which will give you the amount of salt now in the food.

Or you can just realize it is a lot of salt.


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