Marinating Meat: Tips

In my own experience, marinating meat is much like grilling. We tend to overdo it and often go way over the top. If a little is good, A LOT must be much better, right? There are a number of myths about marinating meat. There are also some things you may not understand about meat and how it accepts liquid.

• Marinade only penetrates a very superficial layer of meat. Marinade will not enter the insides of a steak and add flavoring to the inside. Marinade hits only a thin layer of the outside of a piece of meat. If you’d like to try this yourself, take a simple marinade such as soy sauce or worcestershire sauce and soak your meat in it for a long period of time. Then, slice the meat down the middle. You’ll see that only about a millimeter of meat has been penetrated by the marinade.
• Acids and Enzymes actually begin to cook your meat during the marinating process. The conventional wisdom is that acids “tenderize” meat, but the reality is that acids turn the outside of your meat mushy and don’t have any significant effect on the substantial connective tissue of the meat. If you do decide to use some sort of acid in your marinade, use it sparingly and for only short periods of time. Enzymes from fruits or juices do the exact same thing.
• Marinades are best for small or thin cuts of meat. A huge steak is not going to accept much of your marinade. Small cuts of meat are the best. Think a petite sirloin.
• Avoid salad dressings as marinades. Salad dressings tend to have a lot of acids. Also, why put some Wishbone salad dressing on a $10 steak?
• Use salt. Salt is not just for flavoring. Salt has a brining effect which increases the juiciness of the meat.
• Use oil. Herbs and spices are soluble in oil, so oil helps herbs to release their full flavor. To get the most out of a marinade that has herbs in it, always use a little oil.
• Use soy. Soy is my favorite marinade ingredient and many of the great marinades include soy as a substitute for salt. The regional steakhouse Steak and Ale had a legendary steak called the Kensington Club and its marinade recipe used soy. Soy on its own is a wonderful marinade for steaks.
• Long soaks in marinade do not help – they actually harm the meat. Long soaks actually are bad for the meat and do not increase the meat’s absorption of the flavors in your marinade. Since marinades do not soak into meats very deeply, this is just pointless. Long soaks are the marinating version of the backyard barbeque guy that flips the meat ten times and never closes the lid on the grill.
• Pepper burns and is not a good component of a marinade.
• Sugar or honey is a great ingredient for marinades if you wish for your meat to brown or blacken during the cooking process.

What you’ll find after you experiment with marinades is that less is more. Of course, when I first got serious about cooking, I came up with some crazy improvised marinades. However, what I found was that they didn’t really do anything to the meat that was interesting or recognizable to the taste. My favorite way to marinate a steak is to soak it in a little soy sauce for about 30 minutes. It has a nicely complex flavor with reasonable salt flavor. No, it doesn’t taste like Chinese food either. The main ingredient in soy sauce is wheat, much like beer. Wheat and salt together create a very complex flavor.  I encourage you to experiment, but I will give you some ingredients that work well for marinades:

• Salt
• Garlic powder
• Soy Sauce
• Oils
• Sugars or honey

Tagged as: Marinating Meat, Marinating Steaks, Soy Sauce