How Much Salt Goes in a Brine? The Ratio, and Why Sources Disagree
August 30, 2026
The recipe said one and three-quarter cups of kosher salt in four litres of water. You had a box of Morton in the cupboard, so you measured one and three-quarter cups of Morton, dropped the chicken in overnight, and roasted it the next day. It came out of the oven looking perfect and tasting like a mouthful of seawater — the kind of salty where you put the fork down and reach for a glass of water.
Nothing went wrong with your technique. The recipe was written for Diamond Crystal. A cup of Diamond Crystal weighs about 135 g; a cup of Morton weighs about 225 g. So the brine the author intended was 236 g of salt in 4 L of water — a 5.9% brine. The one you actually made was 394 g in the same water: 9.8%. You did not make a slightly saltier brine. You made a brine two-thirds stronger than the recipe, and no cooking method survives that.
That is the whole problem with brine ratios in one paragraph, and it is why the answer to “how much salt goes in a brine” has to be a percentage by weight, never a cup measurement.
The short answer
- Wet brine: 5–8% salt to water by weight. 6% is the reliable default — 60 g of salt per litre of water, or about 227 g per US gallon.
- Dry brine: 0.5–1% of the meat’s weight. 1% is the default — 10 g of salt per kilogram of meat, or about 4.5 g per pound.
- Always by weight. A gram of salt is a gram of salt whatever the box says. A cup of salt is anywhere from 135 to 288 g depending on brand and grind.
Those are the numbers behind our brine calculator, which takes your water volume (or meat weight), your target percentage and your salt brand, and hands you the exact grams plus the matching cup or teaspoon amount for the box you actually own.
Wet brine chart: salt per litre and per gallon
Water weighs almost exactly 1 g per millilitre, so “6% brine” simply means 6 g of salt per 100 ml of water. The cup columns use the same densities as our converters — Diamond Crystal 135 g, Morton 225 g and table salt 288 g per US cup.
| Concentration | Per 1 L water | Per 1 US gallon | Diamond Crystal | Morton kosher | Table salt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4% (mild) | 40 g | 151 g | 1⅛ cups | ⅔ cup | ½ cup |
| 5% | 50 g | 189 g | 1⅜ cups | ⅚ cup | ⅔ cup |
| 6% (default) | 60 g | 227 g | 1⅔ cups | 1 cup | ¾ cup |
| 7% | 70 g | 265 g | 2 cups | 1 cup + 3 tbsp | ⅞ cup |
| 8% (assertive) | 80 g | 303 g | 2¼ cups | 1⅓ cups | 1 cup |
Look at the 6% row and the reason recipes go wrong jumps out: one cup of Morton and one and two-thirds cups of Diamond Crystal are the same brine. A recipe that just says “1 cup kosher salt per gallon” is only correct for one of the two boxes, and almost never says which.
Brine time follows the size of the cut, roughly one hour per pound, up to about a day for a big bird — the same rule the calculator applies. Chicken pieces are done in an hour or two; a whole chicken wants four to six hours; a turkey goes overnight.
Dry brine chart: salt as a percentage of the meat
A dry brine is not a weaker version of a wet brine — it is a different measurement entirely. You are not salting water, you are salting meat, and every gram you put on ends up in the food. That is why the numbers are ten times smaller.
| Salt rate | Per 1 kg meat | Per 1 lb meat | Diamond Crystal | Morton kosher | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.5% (light) | 5 g | 2.3 g | ¾ tsp / lb | ½ tsp / lb | Turkey breast, pork loin |
| 0.75% | 7.5 g | 3.4 g | 1¼ tsp / lb | ¾ tsp / lb | Steak, lean ground beef |
| 1% (default) | 10 g | 4.5 g | 1½ tsp / lb | 1 tsp / lb | Whole birds, fatty cuts |
| 1.25% | 12.5 g | 5.7 g | 2 tsp / lb | 1¼ tsp / lb | Assertive, shorter cures |
Those “best for” rows are not guesswork. America’s Test Kitchen ran the experiment, salting five meats from 0.1% to 1.5% by weight and asking tasters where each one started tasting properly seasoned: turkey breast and pork loin landed at 0.5%, strip steak and 90% lean ground beef at 0.75%, and 80% lean ground beef at 1%. Fat dulls the perception of salt, so the fattier the cut, the more it takes to taste seasoned. That single finding explains the whole 0.5–1% range our calculator offers.
Dry-brine timing is the opposite of wet: longer is better, not riskier. Give it at least an hour per pound, but a whole bird is best at 12–24 hours uncovered on a rack in the fridge. ThermoWorks recommends 24 to 48 hours for a whole turkey, and their teaspoon-per-pound rule of thumb is a nice sanity check on the chart above — a teaspoon of Morton per pound works out to almost exactly 1%, while a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal is 0.62%. Even the rules of thumb are brand-dependent.
Why it works: the drawing-out, then the pulling-back
The old explanation is that brining “osmotically forces water into the meat.” That is not really what happens, and the dry brine is the proof — there is no water to force anywhere, yet dry-brined meat comes out juicier than unsalted meat.
Here is the actual sequence, and it is worth understanding because it tells you how long to wait:
- Salt draws liquid out. Sprinkle salt on raw meat and within twenty minutes the surface is visibly wet. Water moves from the meat toward the higher salt concentration on the outside. If you cooked it now, you would have the worst of both worlds: salty on the surface, drier than when you started.
- The salt dissolves in that liquid and forms a concentrated brine sitting on the meat. ThermoWorks describes exactly this — the juices are drawn to the surface, the salt dissolves in them, and the resulting brine “is eventually reabsorbed by the meat.”
- It gets pulled back in, deeper. Over hours, that salty liquid diffuses back into the muscle, carrying the salt with it. This is why a dry brine seasons through the meat rather than just coating it, and why an hour is not enough.
- Salt changes the proteins. Dissolved salt makes muscle proteins less likely to squeeze together and expel water when they hit heat. The meat holds on to more of its own juices during cooking. This is the effect that actually makes brined meat juicier — not extra water sloshing in.
A wet brine adds the same protein effect plus some genuine added water, which is why it wins on lean, easily overcooked birds. A dry brine skips the water and gets you something a wet brine cannot: a dry surface, which means skin that crisps instead of steams. That trade-off, not “which is better,” is the real choice.
So why do the sources disagree?
This is where it gets interesting, because the disagreement is not sloppiness — the sources are answering slightly different questions.
The research says about 6%. Cook’s Illustrated notes that studies of salt uptake put maximum saltwater absorption at roughly a 6% concentration. Below that, you leave moisture retention on the table; above it, absorption starts to fall off. If your only goal is a juicy bird, 6% is the physics answer, and it is why our calculator opens at 6%.
Their tasters said 9%. In the same breath, America’s Test Kitchen reports that when they brined chicken side by side, tasters preferred the 9% brine even though the 6% brine absorbed marginally more saltwater. Their conclusion: the flavour gain from the stronger brine was worth the trivial loss in absorption. That is a seasoning answer, not a moisture answer, and it only holds for the short brines a test kitchen runs on chicken parts.
The food-safety guidance sits lower — or shorter. University of Illinois Extension’s turkey brine is 4 cups of kosher salt and 1 cup of sugar in 2 gallons of water for 6 to 8 hours. Run the arithmetic: with Diamond Crystal that is a 7.1% brine, with Morton an 11.9% one — which is exactly why they cap it at 6 to 8 hours. University of Wyoming Extension goes the other way, with 2½ cups of kosher salt in 2 gallons for 24 to 36 hours — 4.5% with Diamond Crystal. Weaker brine, longer soak; stronger brine, shorter soak. Both land in the same place.
So the “disagreement” resolves into one rule: concentration and time trade against each other, and everybody publishing a number is assuming a time you may not be using. A 9% brine for one hour and a 5% brine overnight both season a chicken well. A 9% brine overnight ruins it. When you change the concentration on the brine calculator, change the time to match — down when you go stronger, up when you go milder.
The one thing every source agrees on is the part nobody publishes clearly: measure the salt by weight, because the brand disagreement is bigger than the expert disagreement.
The salt-brand problem, in one table
Even the reference charts do not agree with each other. Morton’s own conversion chart says 1 cup of table salt equals 1¼ cups of its coarse kosher salt, while America’s Test Kitchen’s chart says 1 teaspoon of table salt equals 1½ teaspoons of Morton and 2 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal. Both are defensible — crystal shape means a cup of flaky salt packs differently depending on how you scoop it — and both become irrelevant the moment you put the box on a scale.
| Salt | Grams per US cup | Grams per tsp | vs. Diamond Crystal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diamond Crystal kosher | 135 g | 2.8 g | 1.00× |
| Coarse sea salt | 220 g | 4.6 g | 1.63× |
| Morton kosher | 225 g | 4.7 g | 1.67× |
| Fine sea salt | 256 g | 5.3 g | 1.90× |
| Table salt | 288 g | 6.0 g | 2.13× |
Swap Diamond Crystal for table salt cup-for-cup and you have more than doubled the salt. Our salt converter does this swap in either direction if you are working from a recipe written for a box you do not own — and the brine calculator has the same brand list built in, so the cup amount it shows already matches your salt.
Brine safely, and cook to temperature
Brining is a cold-kitchen process, and the rules are short:
- Brine in the refrigerator, below 4 °C / 40 °F, for the entire time — both Illinois and Wyoming Extension are explicit about this. A bucket on the counter or in the garage is not a brine, it is a bacterial incubator. For a wet brine, that means finding fridge space for the whole container before you start.
- Never reuse a brine. It has held raw meat. Pour it out.
- A dry brine goes uncovered on a rack in the fridge, which is what dries the surface for crisp skin. Pat it dry before cooking; there is no need to rinse.
- Rinse and pat dry after a wet brine so the surface is not carrying a film of concentrated salt into the oven.
- Cook to internal temperature, not to the clock. Brined meat is still raw meat. Poultry is done at 74 °C / 165 °F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from the bone — the figure both extension services cite. A brine changes the seasoning and the juiciness; it changes nothing about doneness.
Putting it together
Pick your method, weigh your salt, and let the percentage do the thinking. For a wet brine, start at 6% and adjust the time to the size of the cut. For a dry brine, start at 1% of the meat’s weight — 0.5% for something lean like a turkey breast — and give it overnight. Enter your numbers in the brine calculator and it will do the arithmetic for both, in US or metric units, with the cup amount matched to your brand.
Once the bird is seasoned, the rest is scheduling. Our turkey cooking time calculator works out the roast time and the rest for the weight you have, and if the bird is going on the smoker instead, the meat smoking calculator builds the whole timeline backwards from when you want to eat — a plan we walk through in how long to smoke meat.
Always follow current food-safety guidance — see our disclaimer.