The Iconic Southern Beverage You Should Be Using In Turkey Brine

As any Thanksgiving host knows, cooking a turkey each year can prove challenging. But brining and cooking it correctly is worth it if you can achieve a perfectly moist and flavorful cooked bird that impresses your guests. Just in time for Thanksgiving, you may be surprised to learn that sweet tea can be the secret ingredient to unlocking a new level of flavor in your turkey. It's no secret that Southerners love their sweet tea. It's a tasty and refreshing drink that seems to hit the spot every time, but it can also be the perfect addition to a wet brine. 

Sweet tea offers a blend of earthy flavors that work well with whatever spices you've got in your mix. It's also filled with sugar, which is essential in a classic wet brine, and, obviously, sweet tea is already wet. You can add a glass (or more) of sweet tea to your brine solution at any time and get your turkey soaked perfectly to seal in the moisture. When it's time to eat, you'll have a juicy turkey that's infused with a distinct Southern flavor. It can be a perfect addition to this Thanksgiving centerpiece staple that can become notoriously dry if not cooked correctly. 

Adding a glass of already-made sweet tea — like our favorite three-ingredient store-bought brand, Milo's — to your brine is one option for infusing those great flavors, but you can also make brine from scratch using your favorite tea bags. After boiling water, add the tea bags (Luzianne's sweet tea bags would be a good choice), garlic, lemons, sugar, and your spices of choice (rosemary, sage, and thyme work especially well with Thanksgiving flavors) and steep for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes, you can squeeze the liquid from the tea bags into your water and stir until the sugar and salt are dissolved. This gives your brine citrus flavor from the lemons, earthy flavors from your spices, a strong flavor from the garlic, and, of course, the sweetness of sugar and the herbal tasting notes of your chosen tea.

You can also play around with the sweetener you use. Plain white sugar is a classic choice, but honey, brown sugar, sorghum syrup, or maple syrup would provide complementary rich, earthy flavors for your Thanksgiving spread. With your mixture all set, just stir in ice water before submerging your turkey in the sweet solution for at least eight hours. Because salt changes the protein structure in a turkey, it allows liquid (in this case, your brine) to penetrate deeper, which keeps your turkey hydrated during cooking. As a bonus, it also results in crispier skin. That means the flavor of your favorite sweet tea will soak in, giving you a flavorful, moist bite when you've got your turkey cooking time down to a tee and it's ready to eat.