It continually seems like a terrific idea at the time. Leave the meat to soak for some hours — or maybe in a single day — in a flavor-packed marinade, then toss it on the grill. The effects have to be a satisfying marriage of grilled goodness: seared meat that’s deeply imbued with candy, salty or tangy flavors from the marinade. Should. But the high-quality laid plans can disintegrate once the brisket hits the flame. Marinades can do a little bit of exact or a whole lot of harm, sometimes leaving meat rubbery, tender, or sour. Fortunately, there’s a disarmingly smooth answer for avoiding marinating mishaps: Marinate the beef after you prepare dinner. The opposite marinade, occasionally called the post-marinate, entails soaking meat in a sauce after it’s been grilled, then reheating it on the grill proper before serving.
The technological know-how at the back of an awful marinade
The first deadly flaw of a traditional pre-grill marinade is that it’s no longer going to do that to enhance the flavor of the completed product. Even the maximum complicated, fragrant marinade won’t soak several millimeters underneath the protein floor, stated Jessica Gavin, a certified culinary scientist who delights in explaining the “why” behind flavors and cooking procedures.
“Marinade is a mixture of flavor compounds,” she defined, “but handiest positive compounds can penetrate.” Chief among them is salt. So even as your soy-ginger marinade might also hum with flavor, the meat is best going to soak up the salt aspect — say, the sodium glutamate from the soy sauce — at the same time as most other flavors will live on the surface.
Add lemon juice — or any other acid — to that marinade, and it’ll weaken muscle groups on the beef for a minimal quantity of tenderization. But leave a strongly acidic marinade too long (like overnight), and the surface of the meat will begin to turn smooth. On top of that, Gavin explains that during the response to the acid, the protein molecules will % closer together and squeeze out extra moisture inside the meat, making the inner dry and chewy. Mushy on the outdoors; difficult on the internal. Not extraordinary.
A sweet marinade isn’t the answer, either. Marinating your meat in a sugar-based sauce is probably going to result in some less-than-tasty blackening on the outdoor grill. “At 320 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, the sugar caramelizes. But past this, it burns,” Gavin said. And most grills are properly above that temperature whilst the beef is resting. “Unless you are smoking or grilling with oblique warmth, or cooking something to be able to be completed very fast, like shrimp or fish,” she explained, “cooking that sugary marinade at the grill will bring about an unpleasant flavor.”
Reverse marinade to the rescue
Luckily for backyard grillers everywhere, the reverse marinade can deliver you from char-broiled chagrin. The technique is famous with Adam Perry Lang, the grilling guru and megawatt chef at APL Restaurant and APL BBQ in Hollywood, California. He advised HuffPost it’s “a wonderful way to impart bright flavors.” He makes use of it to feature brightness to beef filets and brief rib steaks and says it works particularly well in case you intensify the same flavors you’ve already used in the pre-grill spice rub. “For instance,” Perry Lang said, “if you grill with a rub that consists of onion powder, a short Microplane of onion to the put-up marinade offers any other level of experience to it.”
For Laura Sorkin, recipe developer and co-owner of Runamok Maple, a top-rate maple syrup producer in northern Vermont, no task is more gratifying than finding new approaches to incorporate maple syrup into savory recipes and cocktails. Her Grilled Cardamom Chicken changed into stimulated with the aid of the legendary lemon chicken at Rao’s Restaurant in New York City — and the reverse marinade is the lynchpin.
“You lose plenty of the marinade flavor whilst you put it at the grill,” Sorkin said. In Sorkin’s model, the cooked meat — which has been pro most effective with salt, pepper, and oil — is pulled off the grill and located into the room-temperature marinade.
“The residual warmth cooks the marinade a bit,” she said. And because the marinating meat is already cooked, the marinade may be served together with the meat instead of being discarded, which you ought to do with a marinade that’s had uncooked meat soaking in it.
