Chicken brining dilemna

Tricky

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I brined a bunch of chicken quarters today in preparation to cook them this afternoon for dinner tonight. Something came up this afternoon so we couldn't cook the birds - I just poured the brine out of the gallon ziplocs and put the chicken back in the fridge in the empty bags.

My question is this - if I don't cook the chicken until tomorrow afternoon, will they lose the benefit of today's brining? Since brining works by osmosis and the salty liquid passes through the cell walls to equalize the pressure/salinity, now that the chicken isn't immersed in the brine will the brine ooze back out of the cells and end up in the bottom of my plastic bags tomorrow?

Any suggestions? I suppose I could fire up the barrel right now and have a late night smoke party, and then refrigerate the cooked chicken and reheat tomorrow, but I'd prefer to just cook it tomorrow.
 
I think you will have a minimal brine that will turn out better than no brine at all. I would love to see how it turns out. You will be fine. Tomorrow will be fine
 
You'll be just fine. The brining has already worked it's magic. You can not unbrine. You can remove excess salt by soaking in plain water, but the magic of brining has already happened in that the proteins have started to denature and have coile around water molecules thus trapping in moisture. That part is irreversible. If resting after brining was a problem, they would not sell enhanced meats.
 
Thanks guys. I'll cook tomorrow and post pics.

I tried a soy-ginger flavored brine and am now trying to decide what kind of rub to hit the birds with. I may need to pick up some Chinese Five Spice tomorrow morning and experiment with some Asian flavors.
 
The results...

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Great results today - very little liquid in the bottom of my Ziplocs this morning. I didn't really have the makings for a true Asian rub (or what I thought was true Asian) so I hit them with a "potluck rub" made of what seemed like it would go with the garlic soy ginger brine I had used:

garlic powder
ground ginger
cinnamon
brown sugar
kosher salt
paprika
cayenne pepper
medley of peppercorns

Blended up my spices in my Magic Bullet. Then, since I had a bunch of leftover garlic cloves that had been in my brine, I threw them and the few tablespoons of brining liquid that remained in the bottom of my Ziplocs into my Magic Bullet blender and blended them up with some melted butter and some more of my potluck rub - then injected that under the skin of the thighs of my chicken quarters.

Popped them on my gasser on high to get some good color on the skin, then into the drum at about 275 deg.

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Photo looks like the skin is black in a few spots, but the actual skin looked great and tasted great too.

Perhaps not a traditional flavor profile but it was tasty and is something I would try again.
 
Sounds really cool! The flavors sound very interesting, and definitely sound like they would work.:cool:
 
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