When you make a brine do you have to cook it on the stove to dissolve the salt and sugar or do you just stir it and put the chicken in?
I've seen it done both ways. I have never bothered to cook mine, just stirred until dissolved. If you choose to cook the brine first, be sure to allow plenty of time for it to cool before you put your chicken in.
KyNola
I'm with KyNola, make sure cooked brine is cold before adding the bird. I rarely heat any brine.
Gotta agree...never saw the need for the added work. There may be some brines that require heating I guess but I just always make sure the brine is stirred up good. Additionally, sometimes the heating of some ingredients changes the flavor of the ingredients to me so I don't like to mess with that as well. Additionally, and this is just me talking, but if I'm brining to cure the meat, I'm always afraid that if the brine gets too hot, you lose some of the ingredients to evaporation that would make the cure "not add up" to what was intended. I may be totally off-base about that but when it comes to food prep, I try to do anything to avoid things that will cause the nasties, especially when dealing with the stomach of little kids, as is the case in my household. Cause, believe me, if anything can be screwed up, I can find a way to do it. Just ask my wife who wanted brownies in a bad way, so I made some for her and misread the recipe and added an extra cup of flour. It mixed up okay, but when they got done baking, the brownies could have been registered as a dangerous weapon they were that hard. :o ;D
I always bring the water to a boil, stir in the salt, then then other ingredients. I then let it cool on the stove overnight and put the food in it with 10lb of ice and a few frozen gallon jugs, all into the 5 day cooler.
The heat can help dissolve some of the solids (like salt and sugar) for a better mixture. Many of the brine recipes I have seen use a small portion of the entire quantity of water to dissolve the dry into, then after a little cooling, add the rest of the water to help bring down the temperature of the mixture.
I use a salinometer to measure salt and cure and I use cold water.
Also when mixing try not to intoduce air (oxygen) into the brine.
I do it both ways. It depends on the brine. Heating does quicken and makes it easier to dissolve the sugar and salt, but if you are using a mixture with sodium nitrite in it, then I never heat it or add the sodium nitrite after it has cooled down. Heating is a real advantage if you are adding spices such as pickling spice, juniper berries, cloves, garlic cloves etc. that increase the flavoring from those ingredients.
When I do heat the brine, I don't heat the whole amount. That takes too long to heat up and cool down. I just heat up a portion then use ice to quickly cool the brine down.