How To Dry Brine a Turkey

Thanksgiving planning often starts with the turkey. There are questions that immediately emerge: How much turkey should I buy? What’s the best way to cook a turkey? And should I brine the bird? If so, wet brine or dry brine?

Our opinion: You should always dry brine your roast turkey. Learning how to brine a turkey is the key to making sure your bird is super flavorful and moist.

Even if you’re hosting Thanksgiving for the first time and are a bit nervous about cooking your inaugural turkey, here’s how to dry-brine your turkey like a pro and turn out an impeccably juicy and crispy bird.

When you’re dealing with a large piece of lean meat like a whole turkey, it’s easy to overcook it into a dry, unappealing texture. Also, just seasoning it right before cooking means there’s no time for the salt to penetrate into the meat, especially for thick cuts.

Brining, or soaking a piece of meat in salty seasoned water, is a way to inject both flavor and moisture at the same time.

How does a dry-brine work, exactly? First, the salt draws out the meat juices through osmosis. Next, the salt dissolves into the juices, essentially turning into a “natural” brine even though there isn’t any added liquid. And finally, this brine is reabsorbed into the meat and starts breaking down tough muscle proteins, resulting in juicy, tender, seasoned meat.

The larger the piece of meat, the more time is needed for the brine to be effective. This method was made popular by chef Judy Rodgers, who dry-brined her famous roast chicken at San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe.

Now that we know what dry-brining is, what are its advantages, especially when cooking a Thanksgiving turkey?

Since a whole turkey needs one to three days of brining time, the dry-brining can be done in the quiet days before Thanksgiving Day madness sets in, when you have time to focus without any distractions. In fact, prepping and brining a turkey can be quite relaxing if you turn some music on and reward yourself with a glass of wine!

With a dry brine, you just mix the salt and spices, rub it on the meat, throw it in the fridge, and you’re done! You can basically forget about it until you’re ready to cook the turkey. This is in contrast to a wet brine, which requires a container big enough to hold the turkey, submerged in water, and space in your fridge to store it.

Dry-brining can be done on anything big enough to hold the turkey, such as a roasting pan or sheet pan.

The turkey sits uncovered in the fridge while sitting in its dry brine. This can seem a little scary (raw turkey, eek!), but it really helps to dry out the skin, which in turn gives you incredibly crispy, golden-brown skin on the roasted bird. If you’re worried that space in your fridge will be tight and other foods might bump up against the turkey, you can cover it loosely with plastic wrap or foil and just pat the skin dry right before you cook it.

When starting on this magical adventure of dry-brining, here are a couple of things to know.

Since you’ll be doing your own seasoning with salt and spices, you want to start with a bird that has no seasoning in it at all. Stay away from kosher turkeys, which have been pre-salted, as well as self-basting turkeys, which have been injected with a salt solution. Go for a natural or heritage turkey, and if you’re not sure if it’s already been seasoned, just check the label to make sure it has no added salt.

While you can definitely dry-brine a still-frozen turkey (see Recipe Notes below), I like starting with a thawed one so that I can separate the meat from the skin and put some of the dry brine directly on the meat. If the turkey was frozen solid when you bought it, the turkey needs approximately 24 hours for every five pounds of turkey to thaw completely. For quicker thawing, place the turkey in a cold water bath and change the water every 30 minutes until it’s thawed.

It doesn’t matter if you have a whole turkey, a bone-in turkey breast or a spatchcocked (or butterflied) turkey, the brining process is the same. In our photos below, we’re showing how we dry brine a spatchcocked turkey.

I like to separate the skin from the meat so that I can rub some of the brine directly on top of the meat — just sprinkling the brine on the skin means it will need more time to penetrate the skin to get to the meat. It’s also important to put more dry brine on the turkey breast, which is much thicker than the legs — just think of it in proportions.

Brining needs adequate time in order to be effective, so the thicker the piece of meat, the more time you want to give it so that the salt has enough time to work its way down from the surface. Although you can cook a dry-brined turkey after one day, giving it three days yields a much more tasty bird.

Once your turkey is brined, you can choose whatever method you like for cooking it: traditional oven-roasting, deep-frying, or even grilling are all fine to do with a brined bird.

Both dry brines and wet brines are popular methods for preparing a whole turkey that is flavorful and moist, though each has different requirements. Dry brines call for applying a large amount of salt (mixed with other seasonings such as herbs) to the dried surface of a cut of meat or poultry. A wet brine, however, involves submerging and soaking the turkey in salted and seasoned water.

While wet brines are favored because they provide a lot of moisture, they’re often difficult for most people to do from a practical standpoint — it requires a large container that can fit a whole turkey as well as enough fridge space to chill it. A dry brine, though, can be done on a baking sheet and doesn’t require working with large containers or amounts of water.