The Briney Deep

This makes meat better.

Note: This is another requested post. My wife got all bent out of shape when I said that she should brine some chicken breasts before she baked them the other weekend. She insisted that I hadn't revealed the secrets to how I brine things and suggested that I was hoarding knowledge so that I could remain valuable around the house. She might be right, but here it is anyway.

Brining meat is simply the act of soaking meat in water that has had salt added to it. Most people know it from ham, hams are brined and that's part of why they are delicious. In addition to salt, adding sugar and liquid smoke will dramatically improve the flavor of almost everything. I brine beef and chicken and shrimp. The only thing I don't brine is pork because pork is awesome just the way it is. For a better explination of brining than I'm capable of giving you, read this.

Brining meats, a primer.
First some rules:
1. Thawed meat only.
2. You need enough water to cover the meat.
3. The thicker the meat, the longer the brine. Shrimp for 30 minutes or so, chicken breasts for an hour, beef roast for three. Interpolate everything else from this.

Take your meat and cover it with water in some container that holds everything. Keep track of how much water you add. For every quart of water, add equal parts table salt and sugar, 1/4 cup to the quart. Add 2-3 shakes of liquid smoke per quart as well if you want too. It makes it taste better, so you probably want to. Cover the meat, put it in the fridge for the allotted time, pull it out, dry it off and cook it. It's just that simple. There's some osmotic pressure differential thing driving moisture and sugar and salt and liquid smoke into the meat. It will be moister and taste better compared to an unbrined piece of meat. If your recipe calls for salting the meat when you cook it, back off a bit so things don't get too salty. For a slightly different flavor, substitute honey or maple syrup for the sugar (about half of the amount of sugar you would have added.
When you have the time, brining meats before you cook them will make them better. I think it's the single biggest reason that restaurant meats taste different than things cooked at home. Use what I have here as a guideline, but not as a final answer. Brines can be as simple as just salt in water or can involve a list of spices and buttermilk and god knows what else. Look around on the internet and in cookbooks. Apply techniques from one recipe to another, from one meat to another. This is good stuff.