Jenise’s recent post of her brine recipe and a couple of the comments that followed it got me thinking about brining. I brine a lot—hams, tongues, bacon, pig’s heads, and chicken breasts prior to smoking. I have never found a need to brine poultry that will simply be roasted. Anyway, when I look at brine recipes there seems to be a large difference in the amount of the various ingredients that the recipes specify. (A search at the Food Network web site for recipes involving “brine” yields 841 results of all different concentrations.) And I have to confess to a certain degree of imprecision in the brining recipes on my own web site. Mea culpa!
To make amends, I've built a brine calculator in my web site. I got the idea after reading Cooking By Hand by Paul Bertolli. I found his calculation a little confusing at first so I built the calculator to do the math for me in real time. To test it, I set a beef tongue in the brine (calculated with the default settings) four days ago. Today I cooked it and it came out great—nice color and great flavor—barely a hint of salt. If you brine meat, you may want to try the calculator.