 I'm going to show you guys how to cook the perfect Thanksgiving turkey and this technique can be applied to any poultry in general. The two most common techniques that people talk about are a wet brine and less commonly a dry brine. A wet brine is when you pretty much marinate the chicken or turkey overnight in the salt water solution and a dry brine is just putting salt on the outside of the skin and both of these methods have their pros and cons. They both make the turkey juicier but the wet brining method makes it much juicier whereas the dry brining method also adds a dry, crispy skin texture. By combining these techniques, doing a wet brine and then drying the skin out in the fridge, we get the best of both. So here I have chicken but you could do this with any poultry. It doesn't really matter. The only thing that's going to change is the amount of liquid you're going to use. Here I have a very flavorful chicken stock that I make and I mean I recommend you could just use water. I like using vegetable stock. What I have on hand right now is a very high quality chicken stock. What this is going to do is this is going to reinforce the flavors. If you don't have something like this, what you could do is you could just take some mirepoix, some celery, carrot, onion, with some herbs, bay leaf, thyme and put it in with the water here. That's one quart of chicken stock. Now for every cup of stock, you want roughly one tablespoon of salt. So we're going to add four tablespoons of salt to this brine. Some brines call for sugar, some don't, but the rule of thumb is generally half as much sugar as salt. So I'm going to do about two tablespoons of honey and that's really it. We're just going to make sure this is incorporated really well. I'm just going to kind of like tie this bag up a bit to make sure that the chicken is completely encapsulated in the liquid. You could do a turkey in a cooler too and this actually looks like it's leaking a bit so that's why I have a double bag here. But the purpose here is to maximize all the flavor elements. We have salty with the salt. We have sweet with the honey. We have umami, there's some seaweed in the stock. We're going to also maybe incorporate some acidity with some lemon juice after we cook it. You want to hit all the flavor notes and this brine is pretty much enforcing all of those things as well as making the chicken a lot juicier by transferring the salt and the sugar through the cell membrane into the chicken. I mean if you were to do a dry brine you guys can Google videos on dry brining. You literally just rub the whole thing in salt and put it on a rack. So this is going to go in the fridge overnight. You don't want to brine something for more than 24 hours otherwise it will become too soft. If you want to brine it for a longer period of time you would reduce the amount of salt in the brine. So I'm probably going to flip this once in about 12 hours and then we'll take it out tomorrow night. So the poultry has been brining in the fridge for 36 hours and that's kind of the upper limit unless you want to reduce the salt content of the brine. I would say minimum 24, 36 is kind of overkill. I just didn't feel like taking it out last night. I just put it on a rack. So this is just going to sit in the fridge for about 24 hours until the surface is completely dried out. Alright guys so the chicken has been in the fridge overnight and I actually took it out and let it sit at room temperature for about an hour just to warm up a bit before we put it in the oven. So here's the chicken. The surface is super duper dry. Like if I rub my finger across the surface of this chicken there's no moisture on my hand. That is the goal here and some people like rubbing like butter and salt and honey under the skin. I think that's delicious but I don't like separating the skin from the flesh of the chicken because if I cut the breast off after I do that then the skin kind of falls a little over the place. I like keeping the skin nice and tight on the burn. So all we have to do now is put this in the oven and the cooking temperature here is kind of like the margin of error is alleviated a lot because we did all this prep work ahead of time. We have a nice brined juicy chicken. We have a nice dry surface so the things that we need to do are going to come easier. The chicken is going to be juicy and tender because we brined it so we don't really have to worry too much about what temperature we cook it to and the surface is going to get nice and crispy because we dried it out so we don't have to worry about cranking the heat on the oven up. I'm going to put my oven on 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Chicken in the oven probably going to take about 30-45 minutes and one thing I did not mention is if you are cooking duck or game birds the temperature is different. For turkey and chicken we do want the breast to be 145 degrees. So the top is a little darker than we want it but I don't think it's to temperature yet. So if you take the inside of the breast we are at 130 so about 10 more minutes so probably just under an hour for the total cooking time. I'm just going to put a little foil on top because I don't want this to brown anymore. So the internal temp of the breast is 142-ish which is good that's perfect and if we take just inside the leg here it's like the inside of the leg is about 175 which is where we want the dark meat to be. So the reason the dark meat gets to a much higher temperature is because of where it's located on the bird it's closer to the source of heat and the fat retains more heat. So since the chicken measures about 140 in the deepest cavity of the breast it's going to go up to about 150 degrees. So keep in mind yes we're taking the chicken out at 140 but it will go up to 150 degrees that being the end goal temperature. So I'm going to let this chicken rest for probably 20 minutes and then we'll take a cut into it. One thing I forgot to do is you could put some water in the bottom of the pan just so that it doesn't dry up. More important if you're making a gravy. So while the chicken is resting I'm just going to put a little bit of butter and honey on it. It's a pretty interesting I think it was like an eater's night out or a munchies night out of honey butter chicken I think it's a restaurant where they used to serve honey butter with like the bread and then they tried dipping the chicken in it and it's amazing so this is just coat the outside of this in honey and butter and for turkey I might do maple syrup seems more like Thanksgiving oriented but either way it's delicious. It's sweet the salted butter is re-seasoning the outside of the chicken and the crust is still going to be nice and crispy and of course you could like put some honey and some butter on the side to dip it in too while you're eating it. You can talk yeah I'm just going to taste it okay. This is I'm going to taste the chicken this is breast meat and with my favorite part the crispy skin. The chicken is delicious the skin is just crispy enough and the chicken most importantly the white meat is extremely moist and tender and it's cooked all the way through thoroughly thoroughly and not dry at all. It's delicious so if you cook your chicken like right 240 without brining it it'll still be much juicier when you're used to but this is kind of like a combination of techniques that most people don't use when cooking their poultry in general not only are you taking to the right temperature to retain the moisture and not overcook it you're also brining and adding that moisture to it. It's very good. It's very chickeny right? Not too strong and it's just I'm amazed at how tender the breast meat is and how moist it is. It's usually the breast meat is very dry and if you look at the chicken the whole chicken and the moisture that's in there all over the cutting board but when it was cut I've cooked a lot and I've never had chicken that moist and that moist moisture come out of the chicken. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope your turkey or chicken turns out just as good for your family as mine did. If you guys have any questions about this technique or cooking in general feel free to leave them in the description. Also let me know what cooking videos you guys would like to see in the future. I'm thinking of doing beef tartare, beef carpaccio, just kind of like carnivore focused dishes as that is the diet I follow so I think those are most appropriate to do first. If you guys do want to support me of course please just share the video. You can reach out to me one on one for diet consultations via my email or website in the description below. 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