How to Marinate Meat

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:20


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone, and welcome to your next GMC Trade Secret. This one’s all about marinating meats.

Now, there’s a bit of a difference between a dry rub, which is one way to get flavor into your meat, or a wet marinade. The wet marinade ends up with something looking a little bit like this. Beautiful, right? Now, this is a big flank steak that I’ve marinated. The marination of a wet marinade is usually done for stuff that you cook low and slow. That doesn’t mean that you can’t wet marinate to grill, but it usually refers to stuff that’s being cooked slower.

I’ve got a bunch of ingredients here on this little platter, sort of ideas of things that you can use to marinate – a bit of soy sauce, a bit of sesame oil, some lime juice. Citrus is always good. There’s lemon over there as well; some little spring onions, some shallots, some garlic, some ginger. All those sort of flavors are good.

It’s a bit like a marinade is to the meat what the vinaigrette would be to a salad. You need the acidity and the oil. So here you use the lime juice as the acidity and maybe the sesame oil as the oil.

Over here with the flank steak, I’ve got some garlic, some chili flakes, some lemongrass, some soy, all those different flavors that we put onto the flank steak, and then you can marinate it and just throw it straight onto the grill, or you can even marinate and then roast things.

Over here I’ve got a marinade for some shrimp. So it can be as quick as a half hour for the shrimp or an overnight job for the flank steak. So for the shrimp I’ve got some lemon juice that I’m going to squeeze straight out of there, a little bit of white wine, which I’ve got just here, some garlic; break up the oregano sprigs and toss the herbs in, mix it with your whisk, and then you take your shrimp and throw it on into the marinade, and then just stir that around. And you keep that in the fridge. Make sure you marinate it in the fridge for maybe an hour or two just before you’re going to grill them.

So glass bowls are great to marinate in; also ceramic. The only thing that you’ve really got to steer clear of is the aluminum, because it can impart that metallic flavor, which isn’t what you want. This is also good. Grab a plastic bag that’s sealable, pop it in the fridge, and marinate it for as long as you want.

I’m Curtis Stone. Now you know how to marinate like a pro. And that was your GMC Trade Secret.