How to Brine a Chicken – Basic Chicken Brine Recipe

A simple chicken brine recipe with only 3 ingredients that produces juicy and moist chicken! Flavor it up with your favorite seasonings and BBQ sauce when ready to cook on the grill or whatever you chose to cook your chicken with.

Chicken Brine for Grilling or Smoking

A simple yet basic chicken brine recipe should only consist of 3 ingredients. My recipe has water, sugar, and salt. THAT IS IT and it produces a moist and juicy chicken no matter what method you decide to cook yours at. Sorry, the picture is pretty boring to look at since it’s just a picture of a chicken sitting in my dutch oven. 

You can use a whole chicken, chicken breasts, thighs, drumsticks, or any type of chicken you have in your fridge or freezer. Just make sure to thaw them out before brining. Make this brine before you go to bed at night so the chicken brines all day and night in the fridge and it’s ready to go whenever you decide to cook it. You can add more ingredients to your chicken brine such as peppercorns, lemons, herbs, whole garlic, and oranges but that is a more complex chicken brine recipe.  I’m pretty sure everyone has salt and sugar in their pantry to make this basic chicken brine.

I love to smoke my chicken or grill it in the Summertime and I decided to smoke my whole chicken. If you decide to smoke your meat, make sure your grill is properly clean and follow the instructions on how to start it up. My Traeger requires a pre-smoke if you must call it that and every SUMMER I forget that needs to be done and I just turn it to whatever temperature it needs to be at right away. When that happens the smoker reaches the highest temp it can go and then I have to shut it off and wait for the whole smoker to get back down to room temperature. I will have another post on Wednesday for smoking a whole chicken in the smoker.

Ingredients for Basic Chicken Brine  

• Water
• Sugar
• Salt

How to make a Basic Chicken Brine

1. Mix brine ingredients together well with a whisk.
2. Place 1 whole chicken weighing 3 to 6 pounds (thawed) in the brine for 8  hours overnight. Cover and store in the refrigerator.
3. Remove chicken from brine and rinse chicken well. You are now ready to make a tender juicy chicken dish of your choosing.

Tips for Basic Chicken Brine

• You can do this with turkey, as well.  If doing a whole turkey, put your turkey in an insulated cooler with enough water to cover and add in a 5 pound bag of ice. Brine overnight. Use same measurements for salt and sugar.
• Can you leave chicken in brine too long? You can leave your chicken in the wet brine for up to two days (a larger turkey can handle more without becoming overly salty), but the liquid will need at least 12 hours to work its magic.
• Do you rinse chicken after brining? Some people tend to lean away from brines because of the salt and they think that the end product will be so salty. That is simply not the case here since you’re removing the brine from the bird and patting it dry with a paper towel before you cook it.
• For those on WW (formerly Weight Watchers) and wondering how to count the points for this recipe I simply wouldn’t since you are removing the bird from the brine and getting rid of any excess brine by rinsing it off under the water. If you are a super tracker count the amount of sugar used. Not sure on how you would count servings for a whole chicken. Depends on the number of pounds and how you end up dividing it into servings. 
• Find whatever cooking vessel you have large enough to store the chicken in while it is marinading. I just used one of my large dutch ovens and filled it with water. Freezer gallon bags also work well with this!

The outcome of this chicken was so flavorful and it reminded me of this Woodfire restaurant near me that makes some of  THE BEST smoked chicken. The chicken was so juicy and tender and now I can’t wait to make leftovers with it this week. I’ll have my method for how I smoke it up on my blog Wednesday