Marinades, Part I

One of the facets of cooking that fascinates me are marinades. I haven't quite decided whether they work or not, to be honest. And professional chefs seem to be split. I know of cooks who swear by them, and marinate just about anything and everything. And then there are others, such as the Queen of vegetarian cooking (who is NOT a vegetarian, by the way), Deborah Madison, who says that in her experience, marinades never get far enough into a product to do any good.

I marinate occasionally. Sometimes, I wonder why I do, and then there are times when I think they do absolutely no good at all. Today, I marinated again. And when I thought about this one, and how it worked, I believe I have at least a partial solution.

Some time ago, I picked up some boneless, heirloom pork chops. I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. They weren't nearly big enough to do a pan fry, and I didn't see them working in a braise. And since they were small (five of them came in at just a bit over a pound and a half), they presented a lot of surface area, and they weren't that thick, so the chance of a marinate doing some good was high.

I mixed up a few things. I still had some of the sour chinottos from Citrus Bomb Kim, and if I didn't, I would have used blood orange juice. I mixed the juice from four of them with a big tablespoon of honey mustard vinegar. And I also added a few sage leaves, and a big pinch of salt. It seemed to me that, since brining meat works so well, putting salt in a marinate would be a big help. So, too, would something acid, like the citrus juice. In fact, I think anything acid would help, and in another marinade I'll be working with tomorrow, the acid is buttermilk or yogurt.

This marinate was very thick. And that was a good thing, because it seemed to me that enough of it would stick so that, when I cooked it, I would get a nice crust. I put the marinate and the pork into a plastic bag, sealed it, and put it in a bowl. This, too, proved to be a good thing, because the plastic bag had a small leak.

I put all this together at 7 in the morning, and tonight, at about 7pm, I heated up the oven pan grill, and heated the oven to 300. Most recipes involving a marinate tell you to scrape the marinate off before you cook. Don't do it. I didn't, and I did not have the clouds of smoke and dangerous kitchen conditions that they would make you think are inevitable.

When the grill pan was hot, I cooked the pork on one side, for five minutes, and got an incredible brown, crispy sear. I then turned the chops and cooked for two minutes, and then finished them in the oven for about 7 minutes.

And that was that. It took me all of about five minutes to put this together in the morning, and then cooking the meat at night? Maybe fifteen. We ate them with sauerkraut from an organic farmer, brown rice and the fruit compote I wrote about a few days ago.

I'm beginning to like marinades more. Chicken is up tomorrow, and there's gonna be another one. I'll tell you all about it. Cross your fingers and hope that it turns out as good as this one does.

And as I think about it, I would bet the marinade I used on this pork, would work just as well on chicken, maybe even on a nice, fatty fish like pacific salmon, or swordfish. Someone wanna give it a try and tell me how it turns out?