What is the proper amount of time to thaw + brine a turkey simultaneously?

Question

I recently saw a tip that you can thaw a frozen turkey in your brine, and I'd like to try that this year. I was planning to thaw my turkey for 3 days in a cooler of water.

I've actually never brined before, so I'm a little worried about over-brining and turning my turkey into mush. The bird we got this year is just under 15 pounds, and the package says to thaw for "3-4 days".

Everything I've found so far says to brine for 1-2 days. Should I plan to start using brine about half way through the thaw process (maybe even leave the wrapper on for that first half, too?), instead of the whole time, or will the bird being frozen initially prevent the brine from doing its magic early on, thus preventing mush?

Answer

A few things aren't quite right here.

1- a cooler full of water for 3 days.
A turkey will take 3-4 days to thaw in the fridge- between 35-40F. Quicker methods call for submerging in running water for some hours. Submerging the turkey in stagnant water- even if it started as ice water- will allow the turkey to rise well above 40F over the course of 3 days. You would have to add ice or have the turkey somewhere colder than 40F for this to be safe.

2- brining too long turning a turkey to mush.
The salt in a brine denatures some proteins and supercharges the bird with water. These will make the meat more tender and seem more tender respectively. That said- the risk isn't that the meat will get mushy. Unless you are adding some other ingredient to the brine that is actually a proteinase like papain the risk is not mushiness but being too salty.

3- 1-2 days of brining.
I have never seen a recipe that called for brining this long. The brine recipes I have seen are on the order of 4-10 hours. If your brine recipe calls for this length of time then it is probably more dilute than the ones I use. In such a case it would probably be fine to thaw it in the brine if you address the safety concern.

The turkey being frozen will prevent the brine from penetrating but as the bird thaws from the outside in the outside of the bird will have more alone time with the brine than the deeper meat. I can't say whether this would be a problem- especially as Harold McGee says that the salt from brining isn't able to penetrate very far into the meat anyway.

Unless it is cold enough outside (or you have enough fridge space) that you could brine the turkey at <40F for 2 days while it thawed I would recommend at least mostly thawing it before introducing it to your brine.

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