How to Marinate Meat

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How to Marinate Meat

Hi, I am Ben Kurtzman with About.com Food. Today we are going to be marinating meat.

Marinades are simple, really. Most involve some kind of oil, some kind of acid, and then your choice of spices. So you can get as creative as you want, or if you are in a hurry you can just use salad dressing, and that will turn out great.

Today we are going to be making a teriyaki-style Asian marinade. The liquid base is soy sauce and rice wine vinegar. If you do not have rice wine vinegar at home, you can find it in the Asian section of most major grocery stores. To add some more flavor we are going to add ginger, garlic, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

When you are making a marinade, the general rule is one-half cup of marinade for every pound of meat. So you want to adjust your recipe accordingly and watch your ratios so you do not waste ingredients.

This New York strip steak is almost a pound, so we are going to make one-half cup of marinade. Let us begin with one third of a cup of soy sauce. That should do it. Now I am going to add the rice wine vinegar until we get to half a cup. That should just about get us there.

The next thing we are going to do is take a teaspoon of garlic and a teaspoon of ginger, which we have chopped up very finely, and we are going to add them to the mixture.

Stir it up. Get it mixed up really nicely. Take a little taste. All good cooks taste. And you know what? This could actually use a little bit of lemon juice. There we go. That is perfect, and it is ready to go on our steak.

So now we are salting our meat. And what this does, is it ensures that the salt, which is going to flavor your meat, is evenly distributed before the marinade comes on. It also works to tenderize the meat so that it is going to melt in your mouth when it comes out of the oven.

When we are selecting a vessel in which to marinate our meat we want something that is going to leave not too much room around the edges for the marinade to swirl around in. We want to keep it tight. This glass bread pan should do the trick for our steak.

Let us start by pouring a little bit of the marinade into the bottom of the pan so that it gets the underside of the meat. Now what I am doing is taking our steak and placing it on top of the thin layer of marinade on the bottom of our pan.

The next thing we are going to do is take the rest of our marinade mixture, pour it on top of the steak, and then we are going to put it in the fridge. We are going to cover it well, make sure we get all of the garlic and ginger out of there. I am going to spread it out a little bit.

One thing you want to look out for when marinating is leaving your meat in too long. I am going to marinate this piece of meat for about three, maybe four hours. If you leave it in too long your meat can get a little bit stringy- the acid really does go to work on it. So you really want to be sure, especially with a smaller piece of meat, you do not leave it in too long.

Thanks for joining us. To learn more, visit us on the Web at Food.About.com.