I did this sort of product review for Kikkoman two weeks ago. They sent me a bunch of soy sauce and a gift card towards the purchase of turkey and other groceries for a practice Thanksgiving turkey dinner. I had NO idea you could brine turkey in soy sauce, in fact, I had never even tried to brine a turkey.  After getting the Brine recipe, we realized that our biggest obstacle was what the heck to put the turkey IN so it could soak in the brine overnight. I had bought an 8.5 pound turkey breast, so my clever husband looked around the house and came up with this styrofoam cooler that some frozen food samples had come in. The turkey fit perfectly!

Chris came up with the great idea to take out the bottom drawer of our fridge and set the cooler right down on the bottom of the fridge.  I mixed up half a batch of the brine recipe and it filled the cooler to the top.

The next day, Ryan carried the cooler to the sink for me, I drained the brine and then rinsed the turkey with water, put it in a roasting pan, and put it in the oven. Turkey should cook for about 15 minutes per pound, so it was done a few minutes past two hours. I didn’t have all the side dishes ready yet, so I covered it with foil, turned off the oven, and that turkey sat in the cooling-down oven for another hour.

It. Was. PERFECT.

That turkey was so juicy inside that we could cut our slices with just our forks. The five of us devoured so much of that turkey that we barely had leftovers for the next day!

So, it was so successful, we decided to brine the turkey for tomorrow as well. Only, this time we have a 20 pound turkey given to Chris by his company.  Once again Chris came up with the perfect solution for something deep enough to hold the turkey plus the two gallons of brining solution-the refrigerator bin!  Thumbs up to Frigidaire for designing a plastic bin strong enough to hold that much weight.  It’s not quite deep enough, so the turkey is upside down so that the brine soaks mostly into the breast meat, we don’t care much if the bottom of the turkey isn’t brined.  Can you believe this is in our refrigerator?!?

I know I”m posting this kind of late for those of you who might want to try this for yourselves, sorry about that. If you have soy sauce in the house and a container that’s big enough (or an empty refrigerator bin!), and you read this post early enough, get your turkey brining for as long as you can.  It really does improve the juiciness and flavor!

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