Brine & Fermentation Salt Calculator

Salt for any brine, worked out by weight

Salt percentage is the single most important number in fermenting vegetables, curing olives or brining a chicken. A brine calculator gives you the grams of salt for the strength you want, so every batch tastes the same and a recipe written for a different jar size can be scaled. Choose a method, set the percentage, enter the water or the food weight, and read off the salt in grams, ounces and level teaspoons.

Three methods cover almost every case. Brine from water makes a stated percentage of the finished brine. Equilibrium brine counts the food as well as the water, so the jar settles at the target strength. Dry salting works as a percentage of the food weight, which is how sauerkraut and kimchi cabbage are usually salted. Everything runs in your browser.

How to use the Brine Calculator

1. Pick a preset (pickles, sauerkraut, olives, meat brine) or type your own percentage.
2. Choose the method that matches your recipe. The preset switches it for you.
3. Enter the water and, for equilibrium or dry salting, the food weight.
4. Weigh the salt shown, dissolve it in the water (warm water helps), cool it, and pour it over the food.

Brine Calculator features

The formulas

If a brine is p% salt by weight of the finished brine, the salt is water × p ÷ (100 − p). For 1,000 g of water at 3.5%, that is 1,000 × 3.5 ÷ 96.5 = 36.3 g. Many recipes instead say “3.5% of the water weight”, which is simply water × 3.5 ÷ 100 = 35 g; the difference is small at low strengths and grows at 8–10%, so the result shows both figures.

For an equilibrium brine, add the water and the food and take the percentage of the total, which gives (water + food) × p ÷ 100. For dry salting, the salt is food weight × p ÷ 100. One millilitre of water is taken as one gram. Salt water becomes saturated at about 26% by weight at room temperature, so higher inputs are refused.

Typical strengths

• Vegetables and pickles: about 2–3.5% brine for lacto-fermentation at room temperature.
• Sauerkraut and kimchi cabbage: about 2–2.5% of the cabbage weight.
• Table olives: brines of about 8–10% are common after debittering.
• Chicken and pork: wet brines of about 5–6% for several hours in the refrigerator.

Safety

These ranges are common home practice, not a safety guarantee. The National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP, University of Georgia) and the USDA publish tested recipes for fermented and pickled foods, and its guidance is to follow the salt, acid and procedure of a tested recipe, especially for anything you will can. Too little salt can let spoilage organisms grow before enough acid forms; keep fermenting food fully under the brine, use clean jars and discard anything that smells rotten or shows fuzzy mould. Botulism concerns mainly low-acid foods kept without air, such as garlic or herbs in oil, which should not be treated as a fermentation.

For meat, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service guidance is to marinate and brine in the refrigerator at or below 40 °F (4 °C), and to throw away brine that has touched raw meat rather than reuse it. This page is a calculator, not food-safety advice for your particular recipe. See also the recipe scaler and the meat doneness chart.