Fish Brine Recipe for Flavor and Moisture

Fish and seafood are delicate and can easily dry out if overcooked. Brining will help your fish and seafood stay moist and flavorful. This is especially critical if you're cooking fish on the grill, since the high temperature, the dry heat can really dry out a piece of fish.

Brining is also a wonderful way technique for flavoring fish and seafood because the ocean is sort of the original brine. Indeed, brining is one of the earliest known methods of preserving foods, possibly because people discovered that immersing food in seawater helped prevent spoilage. That's because the salt kills the bacteria that cause spoilage and food poisoning, by depriving them of water. This is true even if the food is immersed in water.

To preserve meat or fish, you'd want to use a solution of about 10 percent salinity. But we're not preserving here, we're just brining for flavor. Our recipe produces a 4 percent brine, using around 60 grams of kosher salt and six cups of liquid. You could weigh the salt since different brands of kosher salt have different densities, but 1/4 cup is right in the ballpark.

Once upon a time, chefs would test the density of their brining liquid by peeling a potato and dropping it in. If it sank to the bottom, it needed more salt. If it floated to the top, it needed more water. The brine was deemed to be just right when the potato hovered in the middle of the pot.

Even though we're not brining for the purpose of preserving, we still need to be conscious of food safety. The main thing here is ensuring that the brine solution is icy when you add your fish to it. Adding raw fish to room temperature brine could create a food safety hazard.