Thanksgiving Turkey: To Brine or Not to Brine?

Thanksgiving Day is a couple of weeks away, and food writers everywhere - newspapers, magazines, blogs, TV and radio - are passing along their "essential tips" for making the perfect roasted turkey.  Over the past few years, it seems like the most common piece of advice everyone gives is:  Brine The Turkey!

Brining, as everyone from Alton Brown to About-dot-com will tell you, helps a roasted turkey stay juicy and delicious.  The salt in the brine causes the meat to absorb water (and any flavorings you may have added) while partially breaking down proteins in the meat.  With more water in the bird to start with, the meat can lose moisture during the long cooking time without becoming dry or stringy.

For the past ten or twelve years, my family has sat down to a turkey dinner featuring delicious smoked turkey.  I use a hot smoking process, keeping the smoker at about 250 degrees F over pleasant fruitwood smoke (apple or citrus) until a meat thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the thigh reaches about 160 degrees F or even a little less.  (That whole 180-degree thing?  Yeah, that's  a holdover from the "Let's Cook The Living Shit Out Of Everything We Eat" culinary school of the early 20th century, and it's way too high a temp  if you don't want severely overdone bird.)

Generally, I brine everything that goes into the smoker.  Brining is a great method for curing pork cuts, bacon, tongues, corned beef, and so on, and there's no doubt that meats held over the heat for a long time don't dry out if they're tanked up with water to begin with.  The first few turkeys I smoked were brined.

And then one Thanksgiving, in the hectic swirl of preparations, I forgot to brine the damn bird.  I didn't realize it until I actually went into the fridge to fetch the turkey and put it into the smoker.  There was no help for it - the turkey had to go in right then to be on time for our dinner guests and there was no time for the luxury of a soak in a seasoned saltwater bath.

The turkey came out perfect nonetheless, and I think I know why.

First, I held the smoker at a low temperature, and I kept a pan of water just over the heat source.  The "moist heat" environment kept the bird from losing too much moisture over the 5-hour-or-so cooking time.

Second - and this is probably equally important - the turkey was "pre-brined" by the processor.  Take a look at the label of most supermarket turkeys and you'll find a statement in very fine print that tells you that the turkey "contains up to n% solution" with n varying depending on the brand.  Really, if the processor is already adding a brine to the turkey before it gets to the store, there isn't much point to me adding additional brining to it.

Since then, if I'm smoking a commercially processed turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, I don't bother with the brine.  I still brine it if I'm using a free-range or backyard flock bird.  But my advice to you is read the labels carefully.  The label will always note if the bird has an added solution or if there is a percentage of retained water from processing (and you should know that even some poultry labeled "minimally processed" can still contain retained water.