So, What is the secret to a delicious marinade that you can actually taste in your meat or chicken after grilling?
Originally found on Grilling on Quora
My suggestion to “What is the secret to a delicious marinade that you can actually taste in your meat or chicken after grilling?” is to consider both time and concentration of the spices in your marinades. In addition, there are a couple of techniques you can use to get the flavor into the meat.
When we do ours, we marinate the meat with spices and a good amount of salt. Then we wrap the meat in plastic and let them sit in the fridge overnight. That gives time for the salt to work. The salt in the marinade moves water in and out of the meat using osmosis and diffusion.
Salt triggers osmosis by attracting water in the meat and causing it to move towards itself. This can really concentrate the flavor of the meat. Then, if your spices are moist, salt can help it move back into the meat. Salt is a solute. When you add liquid to a solute, it diffuses, spreading out the concentration of salt, creating a solution.
The key to using salt with meat is controlling the process of diffusion.
If you remember basic biology, diffusion is the tendency for substances to disperse through a substance until equilibrium, is reached. This means that the concentrations are balanced out. When you use salt in a meat marinade and let it rest, the salt will disperse to create an even concentration throughout the meat.
Another “secret” is to poke a few holes in the meat using a meat tenderizer. Meat tenderizers that have needles on them can poke holes throughout the meat. These give little channels for the flavors of rubs and marinades to travel into the center of the meat.
These work well, especially on thicker cuts of meat. Again, time is your friend. Let the meat sit in the marinade or rub in the fridge for a few hours at least to give the flavors a chance to go deep.
Finally, there are two other extreme options: injection and butterflying.
You can literally inject flavors with a kitchen syringe into the center of your meat. Most people recognize this as something you do with a turkey or a brisket but it can be done with smaller cuts of meat just as easily. It has to be in liquid form, though, but that’s an easy enough fix. Just add water (or even chicken stock or beef bullion) to your rubs or marinades until they flow easily through the syringe. Make sure that the particles in the marinade are not larger than the needle, otherwise they will clog up your syringe.
Then just poke and push the flavoring into the middle of the meat. One note here is it works better with homemade marinades because a lot of store bought marinades have extra salt, figuring they’ll mostly be on the surface of the meat. When you put the stuff in the interior, you don’t want it to be overly salty.
The advantage to this technique is once you’re done poking, you don’t have to wait for it to set in the fridge. The meat can be cooked right away.
Butterfly Meat
No, we are not harvesting butterflies for their meat, that would take forever.
Instead, you make a cut in the meat laterally, but not all the way through to the end. This makes it open like a book. It takes a little knife skill but is easy to do once you get the hang of it and you don’t need to buy that kitchen syringe. Chill the meat before you start to butterfly it and it is much easier to cut this way. You can also use cutting guides on either side of the meat and it slices very evenly.
Once you have it open, put your spices or brush a marinade on the inside of the meat all the way up to the “hinge.” Then close the two sides back up. You can secure it back together with toothpicks if you like but as it cooks, the proteins will pretty much seal the meat again. You can then marinade or rub the outside of the meat as well. This gives you flavor inside and out.
The hardest part is finding your favorite marinade spice flavor. But, once you do, a good marinade is the spice of life.
