Keto Pickle Juice Brine Turkey Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is pickle juice OK for Keto? ›

Often, people on the keto diet will recommend drinking pickle juice and eating pickles. It's a great source of potassium and sodium, and those electrolytes are important to healthy body functions. The vinegar in pickle juice can also help curb sugar spikes, helping you stay in ketosis.

Brining Alternatives. By far the most common alternative is plain old salting. When you salt a turkey (or chicken) breast, meat juices are initially drawn out through the process of osmosis (yes, this time it really is osmosis at work).

Citrus Apple Cider Vinegar Brine will make your turkey moist and full of flavor! This turkey brine is easy to make and worth the extra step to make a delicious turkey for Thanksgiving! Brine turkey for 8-12 hours.

Drinking a small amount of pickle juice every day may help to regulate the blood sugar levels in your blood. The vinegar in the juice is known to prevent spikes in blood sugar. This helps to regulate both blood sugar and insulin levels.

Interestingly, the vinegar in commercially prepared pickle juice may help lower blood sugar levels. Research shows that vinegar can improve the body's response to insulin and significantly reduce blood sugar after meals.

Pat It Dry

And if you're wondering, no—you don't need to rinse the bird, whether it's been dry-brined or wet-brined, before adding more seasoning and roasting. Again, the bird needs to be dry, and Youngman also notes "it's not particularly sanitary to wash meat in the sink."

Basic Brine

Place that volume of water in a container large enough to hold the brine and the meat. Add 1 tablespoon of salt for every cup of water you used and mix until the salt is completely dissolved. For example, if you are using 1 gallon (16 cups) of water, add 16 tablespoons (1 cup) of salt.

But a brined turkey that is not rinsed would be too salty to eat. Brining slows down the growth of bacteria but does not kill it, said Linda Harris, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis. She and other food scientists have been trying to get Americans to stop rinsing poultry since the late 1990's.

Butterball Fresh Whole Turkey is all natural*, never frozen, gluten free, and raised without hormones on American farms. Every fresh turkey is pre-brined before packaging for meat that's always tender and juicy. *All natural means minimally processed and no artificial ingredients.

Is it OK not to brine a turkey? ›

The Best Alternative to Brining

For the same reason brining works—osmosis—so, too, does pre-salting. In this case, a well-salted turkey holds onto its own natural juices, leading to a moist, flavorful bird.

Turkeys that have been wet brined often yield slightly less brown skin due to more water in the skin. Dry brines work by drawing out moisture in the turkey at the beginning of the brining process, but then the moisture will redistribute with the infused flavors towards the end of the process and during cooking.

When Top Chef winner Kristen Kish took over the responsibility of cooking Thanksgiving dinner, she gave her brother the job of roasting the turkey. This recipe, which she taught him, uses cider vinegar as the brine, which tenderizes it and yields flavorful drippings perfect for pan jus.

Their action lowers the pH of the brine to a point that no pathogens can survive. This is the same microbial activity found in a healthy human gut. They perform the very same tasks in the small intestine as in the pickling jar; they create a pH so low that no pathogens can proliferate.

Summary. Plain pickle juice is free of calories, fat, protein, carbohydrates, and sugar. Some people use it as a sports drink because it contains sodium and potassium to replace electrolytes lost through sweat.

Pickles are perfectly fine on a keto diet. A cup serving only has 3.5 grams of carbs; you don't have to worry about it knocking you out of ketosis. But when you're shopping for pickles, go for sour or dill pickles as sweetened pickles contain too much sugar.

For all its possible benefits, pickle juice also has a significant drawback: It contains a lot of sodium. I generally wouldn't recommend drinking pickle juice, especially if you have health concerns such as hypertension or renal, liver or heart disease.

The Pickle House Pickle Juice (25 ml) contains 0.8g total carbs, 0.8g net carbs, 0.1g fat, 0.1g protein, and 5 calories.