These Braises and Brines Will Instantly Elevate Dinner
Extract all the flavor you can from your meat and poultry.
There’s an advantage to beginning your culinary adventures a few days in advice, particularly if we’re talking poultry or meat. Chicken, pork chops, and briskets gain tenderness and flavor from being brined prior to roasting, grilling, or frying. And brining a turkey, for example, delivers a crisp skin and tender meat throughout.
To make sure your meats are as tender as possible, we’ve rounded up our favorite brine recipes to use for your holiday turkeys and simple weeknight dinners. Brining pork chops in a mix of peppercorns, brown sugar, and fresh rosemary overnight will infuse flavor into every bite. Chicken breasts can be soaked in a white wine braise a day before grilling to be cooked to perfection.
If you don’t have time to brine your meat or poultry before cooking, you can still impart some extra flavor by braising it for a few hours instead. Braises require low and slow cooking either on the stove or in the oven, and leaves the meat so tender that it falls off the bone.
You can braise with wine, stock, or water and enhance the technique even more with the addition of fresh aromatics. Cuts like short ribs, brisket, and chicken thighs respond well to long braises and make for an easy dinner that doesn’t need to be tended to while it cooks. While you might not want to braise a bird whole (though we have a foolproof method to braise a whole turkey from frozen if you’re in a hurry), you can quarter and nestle it into a dutch oven, which saves you the step of carving later on.
Some of our favorite simple braising combinations are garlic, thyme, umami, or molasses spice mixes. Keeping different blends on hand allows for easy and flavorful proteins every time. Find some of our favorites below.
Molasses Spice Braise-Roasted Turkey
Edouardo Jourdan, chef at Junebaby and Salare in Seattle and winner of two James Beard awards, gave us his brine for a delicious, burnished turkey. We amped up the seasonings, since we used it for this surprising method of cooking a bird straight from the freezer, but the flavor combo works for a fully thawed turkey as well: Just cut the brine seasoning amounts in half.
From-Frozen Braise-Roasted Turkey
Normally it takes several hours to thaw a turkey in cold water and a couple more to roast, but dinner is at 5. What to do? Try this method from Flip Wise, chef at The Way Home in Carbondale, Colorado.
For a super-quick gravy, click here.
More Videos From Sunset
Smoked Turkey Legs
Turkey is not just for large gatherings, served as a whole bird, pitmaster Matt Horn says. Breasts can be smoked for a weeknight dinner. Here we use legs—the dark meat is juicer, more flavorful, and less expensive than the white meat. This recipe, which uses a brine made of brown sugar, thyme, garlic powder, onion powder, sage, pepper, and cloves, makes a lot of turkey. If you don’t need as much, just cut the recipe in half.
Umami Braise-Roasted Turkey
At San Francisco’s Rich Table, chefs Sarah and Evan Rich fry up amazing savory doughnuts, sprinkled with a powdered porcini mushroom mix that they call Umami Seasoning. Turns out that sprinkle is great on turkey, too.
See also: Garlic Thyme Brine-Roasted Turkey
Grilled Butterflied Turkey
After years of experimenting with different techniques in our Test Kitchen, we’ve landed on butterflying and grilling as the path to a better bird. Flattened out, the turkey cooks more evenly and quickly, keeping the meat moist, while grilling produces ultra-crisp skin. Plus, your oven is freed up for cooking sides.
Cider-Braised Pork Chops
Hard cider—low in alcohol, not too sweet, and gently flavorful—works beautifully in savory dishes. Here it adds a subtle apple note and keeps the meat juicy. Serve with egg noodles or mashed sweet potatoes.
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