How to Make Dry Rubbed Turkey Breast

So now we’re going to make the brine for the turkey. You know brine is just going to actually add more moisture into the bird and obviously we’ve all had our dried turkey breast experiences and we’re going to try to eliminate that by brining it.

Now, I’m just going to take some water and some salt and some sugar and it’s about twice the amount of salt as is the sugar and just mix this up and basically this is the brine.

If you wanted to put like fresh herbs and black pepper corns and juniper berries and all that kind of stuff, you can put that in there as well to add more flavor. But we’re going to add so many flavors on this turkey. I don’t think we need to worry about that right this second.

So, I’m going to take our turkey breast and just put it right into the brine. Now this is going to be like quick brine. We’re going to put it in the refrigerator for about an hour. I mean literally if you want you can do this for 24 hours or even 48 hours and the longer you brine it, the better it’s going to be.

Now we brine the turkey breast for about an hour and we’re going to make a Spanish style spice rub, something I do with bolos so it’s got that Spanish flavor. We got some paprika and some fennel seed so it tastes a little bit like licorice. Some cumin, very earthy, some black pepper, peppery and some mustard. Put a little salt. We’ll just mix the spice rub up and spice rubs are really a great way to infuse flavor and to think especially when you’re grilling and also it helps create a crust on the outside.

So we’re just going to take a little bit of oil right on top of the skin of the breast, season with some salt and pepper even though we’re putting a spice rub on. It’s a very dense piece of meat with lots of flavor on there and we’re just going to sprinkle some of the spice rub on and we’ll take our turkey breast skin side, spice side down.

So basically what I like to do is just I like to cut across the turkey breast this way as opposed to slicing it down like you old Uncle Harry might have done. I just like the big, thicker slices with the nice crusty, crispy skin on the outside so that each piece has a nice piece of skin that protects it. And then you can put it right back on the plate basically on the same shape just like that. Then you can just set of opening it up a little bit, kind of follow the contour of the plate.