{I've bolded the paragraphs where Viestad discusses that his marinade is more for flavor/seasoning than for tenderizing)
The Myth About Marinades
A Flavor Bath, In a Flash
By Andreas Viestad
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 11, 2008; F01
Putting together my favorite marinade takes some time, not least because I allow it to.
I always start with red wine: one glass for me, one for the marinade. Then I set the two apart by adding garlic and chopped parsley to the wine I won't be drinking. When I pick some thyme from the veranda and rub the leaves between my hands, my kitchen fills with the smell of the Greek islands and never-ending summer. I throw the leaves in, along with grinds of black pepper, a crushed bay leaf and sometimes a drop or two of Tabasco, for temperament.
I taste and adjust, adding a little sugar, some soy sauce. When I am satisfied that the marinade is just right, I pour it over a couple of steaks.
While the meat is marinating, I indulge in a ritual to pass the time: I count to four. One, two, three, four. That's it. And finally I can dedicate myself to the masculine cooking technique that involves the burning of eyebrows, slight smoke poisoning and the charring of meat over red-hot coals.
Marinating meat is one of those mysterious fields in the world of cooking in which there are plenty of opinions and few facts; an area that many people -- mostly men -- claim to master but few can explain.
Why do we marinate our steaks? Fact-checking the list of benefits that marinating purportedly offers can be disheartening, like finding out that the magician you admired so much as a child has a secret compartment in his hat where he keeps a bunny, and that all the cards in his deck are aces of spades. The magic is gone. But by parting the veil of mystique and finding out how marinating works, we can improve the process and, most usefully, discard some of its most time-consuming elements. (As always with food science, illuminating one seemingly insignificant process can also help us understand processes that govern other aspects of cooking.)
The most common claim is that by penetrating the meat, marinades create more flavor, tenderize the meat and make it juicier. But is that really what happens? No; the assumption is based on a naive and conflicting understanding of how nature, and therefore cooking, works. The concept of penetration is a key element in marinade mythology.
Recipes for marinated flank and skirt steaks in an online recipe database illustrate the confusion. Using more or less the same marinade, one recipe calls for thin slices of meat to be marinated for no less than 24 hours, another for four to eight hours. One recipe instructs us to marinate a two-pound steak overnight; another says a four-pound steak should be left in the marinade for three to four hours, and on no account for more than 10. Wildly different instructions for what is basically the same process.
They are all probably fine recipes but a bit more difficult than they need to be.
Let's put aside pickling, brining and making seviche, techniques that warrant their own columns. Normal marinades, such as my simple wine-based one (see recipe), do not significantly penetrate the meat, no matter how long they are left in contact. Food scientists such as Harold McGee and Hervé This have measured the penetration and found it to be staggeringly small. An experiment conducted by This at a meeting of European chemical societies last year showed that after eight days, a slightly salty marinade gave meat a somewhat mushy surface but penetrated less than 1/8 inch into the flesh; a mildly acidic one (such as a wine- or vinegar-based marinade) showed next to no effect.
"This was very funny," This says, "and it has forced us to reconsider many of the assumptions we had about marinades."
The lack of penetration by the marinade refutes the idea that flavor enters along with it. And doesn't it also mean that the tenderizing effect is minimal?
"Well, if you leave the meat in a marinade for a long time, like what we did in our experiment, then you do have an effect," This says. "The meat is more tender. But it is not the marinade that makes it tender: It is time. If you use an acidic marinade, it will protect the surface from spoilage while the rest of the meat matures. And you know when meat matures, it becomes tender."
So what about meat tenderizers? The only effective ones are brutal devices: One is a meat mallet, like a hammer but with an enlarged flat end full of sharp spikes that are used to damage the muscle fibers. The other is based on protease enzymes, such as papain, found in papaya; actinidin, from kiwi; ficin, from figs; and bromelain, from pineapple. The enzymes do a fine job. The problem is that their calling is not so much tenderizing as it is digesting proteins. When you use them on your steak, you're letting the enzymes eat your meat for you. The concept is unappetizing, and so is the result: The enzymes start at the surface, leaving it mushy, while the interior remains as tough as ever. (Such enzymes can be useful after a meal: If you eat a piece of pineapple, you get a kick of sugar and a digestive aid.)
But tenderization is not as important as it once was. In earlier times, when hygiene and slaughtering practices were more primitive and refrigeration was not readily available, most meat that was safe to eat was also quite tough. Safe ways to reduce toughness were much in demand. Today, most of us rely on buying a steak that is already tender rather than maturing it ourselves.
If marinades are so inefficient, why bother?
I can think of several reasons. Some have very little to do with the science of a marinade and quite a lot to do with the way my mind works and the pragmatics of outdoor cooking. I like to flavor my steak with about a dozen ingredients, depending on what's at hand, and there is no way I am going to carry such a substantial part of my pantry into the garden. I mix it all in a marinade that I can carry in a food-safe plastic bag. I also think that without marinades, the grilling season would lack an important ingredient, like the taste of fire and ice-cold beer.
And even for the scientifically minded, there is a rabbit in the hat and an ace up the sleeve. Despite all the things marinating does not do, it does in fact make my steak more flavorful and juicy.
The marinade may not penetrate the meat, but the pleasantly flavored liquid covers a steak better than any spice mixture. In just a few seconds it coats the surface of the steak and every nook and crevice. In a well-marbled rib-eye there will be hundreds of small slits for the marinade to find its way through. To This, what he calls the "capillarity assumption" is powerful: With it, he says, you get just as much effect from marinating for four seconds as for 24 hours.
Even if the marinade does not go farther into the meat, it will cover an area much larger than the visible surface. When we eat, our perception of flavor is largely formed by the surface, anyway; that is why a steak tastes grilled or fried even though only the outer part of the meat has been in direct contact with the grill or skillet.
As for the juiciness, a marinade helps make up for the fact that grilling is a vicious way to cook meat. Instead of using the abilities that technology offers us to adjust and moderate heat, we return to our Neanderthal origins and cook our steaks over temperatures that can easily incinerate them. I like the taste of grilled, even slightly burned, meat, but I do not want my steak to be overcooked, which is a very real possibility. A few times during the grilling, I cool the meat by returning it to the marinade. It is much like basting the meat or setting it aside to rest, but submerging it in the relatively cold marinade is more efficient. It also allows the marinade to find new slits and openings in which to deposit its delicious flavor.
One more way to make marinade work for you, one in which it actually will penetrate the meat, is by marinating after cooking. That does not apply to steak cooked medium or medium-rare, but to long-simmered stews or pot dishes. Have you noticed that those dishes tend to taste better the next day? There are several reasons, but one is that when the cooked meat, whose fibers have been separated, cools off, it will soak up the moisture surrounding it -- like a sponge, or like a marinade that really did what it promised.
Andreas Viestad, author of "Where Flavor Was Born" and co-host of the upcoming public television series "Perfect Day," can be reached at andreas@andreasviestad.com or food@washpost.com. His Gastronomer column appears monthly.
The Myth About Marinades
A Flavor Bath, In a Flash
By Andreas Viestad
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 11, 2008; F01
Putting together my favorite marinade takes some time, not least because I allow it to.
I always start with red wine: one glass for me, one for the marinade. Then I set the two apart by adding garlic and chopped parsley to the wine I won't be drinking. When I pick some thyme from the veranda and rub the leaves between my hands, my kitchen fills with the smell of the Greek islands and never-ending summer. I throw the leaves in, along with grinds of black pepper, a crushed bay leaf and sometimes a drop or two of Tabasco, for temperament.
I taste and adjust, adding a little sugar, some soy sauce. When I am satisfied that the marinade is just right, I pour it over a couple of steaks.
While the meat is marinating, I indulge in a ritual to pass the time: I count to four. One, two, three, four. That's it. And finally I can dedicate myself to the masculine cooking technique that involves the burning of eyebrows, slight smoke poisoning and the charring of meat over red-hot coals.
Marinating meat is one of those mysterious fields in the world of cooking in which there are plenty of opinions and few facts; an area that many people -- mostly men -- claim to master but few can explain.
Why do we marinate our steaks? Fact-checking the list of benefits that marinating purportedly offers can be disheartening, like finding out that the magician you admired so much as a child has a secret compartment in his hat where he keeps a bunny, and that all the cards in his deck are aces of spades. The magic is gone. But by parting the veil of mystique and finding out how marinating works, we can improve the process and, most usefully, discard some of its most time-consuming elements. (As always with food science, illuminating one seemingly insignificant process can also help us understand processes that govern other aspects of cooking.)
The most common claim is that by penetrating the meat, marinades create more flavor, tenderize the meat and make it juicier. But is that really what happens? No; the assumption is based on a naive and conflicting understanding of how nature, and therefore cooking, works. The concept of penetration is a key element in marinade mythology.
Recipes for marinated flank and skirt steaks in an online recipe database illustrate the confusion. Using more or less the same marinade, one recipe calls for thin slices of meat to be marinated for no less than 24 hours, another for four to eight hours. One recipe instructs us to marinate a two-pound steak overnight; another says a four-pound steak should be left in the marinade for three to four hours, and on no account for more than 10. Wildly different instructions for what is basically the same process.
They are all probably fine recipes but a bit more difficult than they need to be.
Let's put aside pickling, brining and making seviche, techniques that warrant their own columns. Normal marinades, such as my simple wine-based one (see recipe), do not significantly penetrate the meat, no matter how long they are left in contact. Food scientists such as Harold McGee and Hervé This have measured the penetration and found it to be staggeringly small. An experiment conducted by This at a meeting of European chemical societies last year showed that after eight days, a slightly salty marinade gave meat a somewhat mushy surface but penetrated less than 1/8 inch into the flesh; a mildly acidic one (such as a wine- or vinegar-based marinade) showed next to no effect.
"This was very funny," This says, "and it has forced us to reconsider many of the assumptions we had about marinades."
The lack of penetration by the marinade refutes the idea that flavor enters along with it. And doesn't it also mean that the tenderizing effect is minimal?
"Well, if you leave the meat in a marinade for a long time, like what we did in our experiment, then you do have an effect," This says. "The meat is more tender. But it is not the marinade that makes it tender: It is time. If you use an acidic marinade, it will protect the surface from spoilage while the rest of the meat matures. And you know when meat matures, it becomes tender."
So what about meat tenderizers? The only effective ones are brutal devices: One is a meat mallet, like a hammer but with an enlarged flat end full of sharp spikes that are used to damage the muscle fibers. The other is based on protease enzymes, such as papain, found in papaya; actinidin, from kiwi; ficin, from figs; and bromelain, from pineapple. The enzymes do a fine job. The problem is that their calling is not so much tenderizing as it is digesting proteins. When you use them on your steak, you're letting the enzymes eat your meat for you. The concept is unappetizing, and so is the result: The enzymes start at the surface, leaving it mushy, while the interior remains as tough as ever. (Such enzymes can be useful after a meal: If you eat a piece of pineapple, you get a kick of sugar and a digestive aid.)
But tenderization is not as important as it once was. In earlier times, when hygiene and slaughtering practices were more primitive and refrigeration was not readily available, most meat that was safe to eat was also quite tough. Safe ways to reduce toughness were much in demand. Today, most of us rely on buying a steak that is already tender rather than maturing it ourselves.
If marinades are so inefficient, why bother?
I can think of several reasons. Some have very little to do with the science of a marinade and quite a lot to do with the way my mind works and the pragmatics of outdoor cooking. I like to flavor my steak with about a dozen ingredients, depending on what's at hand, and there is no way I am going to carry such a substantial part of my pantry into the garden. I mix it all in a marinade that I can carry in a food-safe plastic bag. I also think that without marinades, the grilling season would lack an important ingredient, like the taste of fire and ice-cold beer.
And even for the scientifically minded, there is a rabbit in the hat and an ace up the sleeve. Despite all the things marinating does not do, it does in fact make my steak more flavorful and juicy.
The marinade may not penetrate the meat, but the pleasantly flavored liquid covers a steak better than any spice mixture. In just a few seconds it coats the surface of the steak and every nook and crevice. In a well-marbled rib-eye there will be hundreds of small slits for the marinade to find its way through. To This, what he calls the "capillarity assumption" is powerful: With it, he says, you get just as much effect from marinating for four seconds as for 24 hours.
Even if the marinade does not go farther into the meat, it will cover an area much larger than the visible surface. When we eat, our perception of flavor is largely formed by the surface, anyway; that is why a steak tastes grilled or fried even though only the outer part of the meat has been in direct contact with the grill or skillet.
As for the juiciness, a marinade helps make up for the fact that grilling is a vicious way to cook meat. Instead of using the abilities that technology offers us to adjust and moderate heat, we return to our Neanderthal origins and cook our steaks over temperatures that can easily incinerate them. I like the taste of grilled, even slightly burned, meat, but I do not want my steak to be overcooked, which is a very real possibility. A few times during the grilling, I cool the meat by returning it to the marinade. It is much like basting the meat or setting it aside to rest, but submerging it in the relatively cold marinade is more efficient. It also allows the marinade to find new slits and openings in which to deposit its delicious flavor.
One more way to make marinade work for you, one in which it actually will penetrate the meat, is by marinating after cooking. That does not apply to steak cooked medium or medium-rare, but to long-simmered stews or pot dishes. Have you noticed that those dishes tend to taste better the next day? There are several reasons, but one is that when the cooked meat, whose fibers have been separated, cools off, it will soak up the moisture surrounding it -- like a sponge, or like a marinade that really did what it promised.
Andreas Viestad, author of "Where Flavor Was Born" and co-host of the upcoming public television series "Perfect Day," can be reached at andreas@andreasviestad.com or food@washpost.com. His Gastronomer column appears monthly.