Marinades and Rubs: Adding Flavor with Minimal Time, Effort and Money
I hope you enjoy Starting from Scratch, my second book, published each week online, one chapter at a time. Before the book’s final publication, I hope to sprinkle readers’ thoughts, opinions and advice throughout. After all, you each have helpful systems and solutions in the kitchen worth sharing. In addition, for each section, I’m consulting experts in their fields – for this excerpt, it’s Lynne Viera, founder of how2heroes.
One of my favorite ways to spruce up a main dish with minimal effort – whether it’s beef, chicken, fish, pork or even veggies – is using marinades and rubs. They dramatically enhance flavor without spending a lot of time or money. That’s my kind of cooking!
Marinades. A marinade is a combination of oil (e.g., olive or canola oil), an acid (e.g., wine, lemon juice or vinegar) and seasonings (e.g., rosemary and thyme). The acid tenderizers the meals while the oil and seasonings flavor it. Recommended marinade times for meats and poultry can range anywhere from 1-2 hours up to a full day. If you can plan meals in advance and remember to make a marinade the night before or in the morning prior to work, this may be just the cooking method for you. When marinating seafood, however, you need to remember a quick tip from Lynne: “Don’t marinate it for longer than ½ hour or it will start to break down the fish!”
When I was learning to cook, I would often marinade chicken with bottled Italian dressing – it’s hard to get much easier than that. Even a combo of lemon, olive oil and rosemary nicely flavors chicken and is almost as easy as the Italian dressing (but better!).
Asian marinades are also simple and tasty with a variety of meats and fish, consisting of soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and garlic (and other combinations therein). One of Lynne’s favorite marinades is a simple mix of olive oil, thyme, salt & pepper.
As mentioned, one nice thing about marinades is the tenderizing feature. A piece of relatively inexpensive meat, like flank steak, transforms into something tasty and tender – by giving it a nice, long soak in a marinade bath. What better meal to make when you entertain a large crowd and don’t want to spend a fortune to do so.
Lynne also adds, “Something you might not think of as a marinade is pesto. I use it all the time on chicken and shrimp. It’s super simple to make – toasted pine nuts (or walnuts), garlic, basil, olive oil – blend then add parmesan cheese, salt & pepper to taste. You can freeze pesto in ice cube trays and take one out whenever you want to make pasta or use it as a marinade.”
Rubs. Rubs were initially introduced to me via the License to Grill cookbook. Though they don’t tenderize meats like marinades, they add lots of flavor with very little effort. Not to mention, you can easily throw on a rub just before the meat hits the heat.
A dry rub is a dry powder consists of herbs and spices, either sprinkled over meat and poultry or rubbed in. You can use pretty much whatever spices you like, as long as you use proportions which don’t weigh too heavily on a hot or particular flavorful seasoning. The downside to using dry rubs is that you are limited to meats, fish and poultry with naturally moist surfaces; otherwise, they won’t “stick.” Lynne thinks rubs are fantastic, too: “I tend to like the ones with a little heat. We have a Rancher’s Rub on our site that I go to time and time again for the ultimate grilled steak.”
In addition to dry rubs, you can make wet rubs, too. Basically, a wet rub is a dry rub with oil added. (I almost always use olive oil). To me, it sticks to surfaces a bit better; and in addition, locks in natural juices better than a dry rub. It also helps prevent the food from stocking to the grill.
However, the addition of oil can cause a potential problem – oil on rubs might get a fire blazing if the heat is too high! On a recent business trip to Seattle, I met up with my girlfriends and offered to cook dinner after we ran. In preparation, I mixed up a wet rub of rosemary, garlic and cayenne pepper and smeared over both sides of some delicious looking lamb chops (This combination, by the way, tastes good on almost anything!). The olive oil, however, didn’t like my friend’s gas grill that I was unaccustomed to using. The chops had been on the grill for no longer than five minutes when we all looked outside her large picture window to see what resembled a small fire in her back yard. Fortunately, her house was safe, but the lamp chops were black and crisp on the outside and too rare for comfort on the inside. You have to keep a close eye on meats while they are cooking, especially if the source of heat is one you have never used before!
Lynne has one last suggestion to tenderize and flavor meats: “Brining is sort of in the marinade family and we have tremendous brining recipe to ensure your Thanksgiving turkey or pork or whichever protein you try, is tender & juicy.”
About Lynne
Lynne Viera is the Founder of how2heroes, the premiere how-to video cooking website. Lynne combined her expertise in creating websites for major brands like Safeway and National Geographic Channel (as the Founder/CEO of Rival Marketing) and her passion for food to create this world-class website destination for people who really want to learn how to cook. Every video is original and carefully shot so viewers can easily replicate the recipes and techniques being demonstrated in the videos. The site features a combination of master chefs like Ming Tsai, Angelo Sosa (Top Chef) and Jason Santos (Hell’s Kitchen) as well as home cooks, farmers, fishmongers – anyone who has creative cooking ideas to share.
Marinade photo courtesy of AnnaHeartFood.
Dry rub photo courtesy of Luscious.
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