Wet Brine for Chicken and Pork

Put the fine salt, sugar, bay leaves, peppercorns, garlic and thyme into a pan with the 500ml of water.

Squeeze the lemon halves in and drop them in after.

Warm over medium heat for 3-5 minutes, stirring, until the salt and sugar have completely dissolved and the liquid is clear.

Take it off the heat before it boils.

Pour in the litre of cold water.

Add the ice and stir until it has melted.

Check the temperature before anything else happens. The brine must be properly cold, below 5C/41F, and cold to a finger rather than merely cool.

Never put meat into warm brine and never brine on the worktop. Salted water at room temperature is an incubator, and a chicken sitting in it for four hours has spent four hours in the range where bacteria multiply fastest. The ice is not there to save time.

Choose a non-reactive container deep enough for the meat to be covered — glass, food-grade plastic or stainless steel. Aluminium reacts with salt and acid and leaves a metallic taste.

Submerge the meat completely and weigh it down with a small plate if it floats.

Put the whole thing in the fridge and leave it there for the entire brining time.

Give boneless chicken breasts or thighs 45-90 minutes.

Give bone-in chicken pieces 2-3 hours.

Give a whole 1.6kg chicken 4-6 hours.

Give pork chops of 2-3cm 1-2 hours, and a 1.5kg pork loin 4-6 hours.

Do not leave it longer on the theory that more is better. Past those times the salt keeps working, the muscle proteins break down too far, and the meat turns spongy and wet with a texture close to cheap ham — and it is too salty to serve. There is no taking salt back out.

Lift the meat out and pour the brine away.

Never reuse a brine. It has held raw meat and it is raw-meat liquid now, whatever it looks like.

Pat the meat dry with kitchen paper rather than rinsing it under the tap. Water running off raw chicken throws droplets around the sink and across the worktop, which is how campylobacter travels around a kitchen.

Wash the container, the plate and anything else the raw meat or the brine touched in hot soapy water, and the sink with them.

Set the dried meat uncovered on a rack in the fridge for an hour or more before cooking if the skin is meant to crisp. Meat comes out of a brine wet, and wet skin steams.

Do not salt the meat again before it is cooked.

Go carefully with salt in any gravy or pan sauce made from the drippings, which will already carry a good deal of it.

Cook it to the same temperatures as unbrined meat: 74C/165F in the thickest part of a chicken thigh.

Know when not to use this. A wet brine is for lean, dry-prone cuts — pork chops, turkey, chicken breasts, anything going under a hard grill — and it is not the route to a crisp-skinned roast bird, which is why the roast chicken with lemon and thyme in this collection is dry-salted uncovered in the fridge instead. The two are alternatives, not a sequence. Never do both.

Note that the carcass of a brined bird makes a salty stock. The chicken stock in this collection is deliberately unsalted so that it can be reduced, so keep a brined carcass for something that will not be concentrated.