As far as meat is concerned, nothing is worse than terrible dry poultry. You know when you’ve had it. And you also know that every time it happens, you wish you were eating a nice juicy steak… But dat cholesterol doe. And so we, as a society, keep coming back to white meat. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve found the answer.

Oh, you wanted that answer? Right. It’s brine. The answer is brine.

What do I mean by that? I mean you wanna take your chicken turkey or lean pork, and put it a sweet and salty bath overnight. There’s some science behind it that sounds a bit counter-intuitive when I try to explain it, but here goes: By soaking the meat in salt, it absorbs some of that salty goodness at the molecular level, and then when it cooks, that salt actually helps the meat retain some of it’s natural moisture (but it also soaks up everything else you throw in there!). So basically, brining your meat makes it extra delicious, and even more important, extra moist.

At it’s most base level, you start with a gallon of water, 1/2 cup of salt, and a cup of sugar. If you wanna crank it up a notch, you can add herbs, seasonings, vegetables, fruit, nuts, booze, whatever you want. If you wanna really go wild, you can check out one of my recipes on Food Republic for a Jalapeño-Stuffed Roast Chicken with a Spicy Honey-Bourbon Glaze and Crispy Skin Chips. Oh, and the end result looks like this: