Musings on marinades

Now, this is something I almost never do - at least on the blog - I'm gonna give you all a tease. Tomorrow is dessert day, and I'm going to post one of MY favorites: blood orange cake. You can thank the Times for that. They published a recipe for blood orange olive oil cake that has me extremely intrigued, as the idea of cakes based on olive oil intrigues me generally. The one I will post is a butter based cake, but I will be trying the olive oil one. Stay tuned.

So, to the subject of marinades. Generally, I am not a big fan. I remember that Deborah Madison, one of the truly great cooks and food writers of our time, wrote about how when she worked at Greens, in San Francisco (a favorite restaurant), she never understood why they marinated tofu. It could sit in the marinade for days, and nothing would happen to the tofu. The flavor just didn't penetrate. That was a piece that made me smile, because I ALWAYS felt that, when I was marinading something, I was doing something wrong. My marinades were always strong, tasty, and with lots of good things in them, but the flavor NEVER carried. And here was someone validating me. Years after I read that article, Keith (you know Keith. He shows up in here a lot) asked me about marinades and how to make and use them. And I passed on that information. But that discussion, and the recollections of Ms. Madison's article, did put me on a tangent that I come back to occasionally, i.e ., is it possible to get a marinade to work?

Well, here are my thoughts. Yes, you CAN get a marinade to work, if your expectations are not overambitious. You can get it to work if you have time and you're willing to make a marinade that, frankly, just does not taste very good in and of itself. And, you can get it to work if you pick the right thing to marinade. In my case, it was pork tenderloin. Last night, two of the amazing Matts, "Las Ratos" were over to cook dinner with me. As always, we had a ball, and this is what we made.

Let me work backwards. In my experience, for a marinade to work, the product itself must carry some fat. If you try to marinade a lean chicken breast, you'd be better off making a sauce. Thighs will work better. Marinade a lean piece of beef, like a steak? Fuggetabout it. Do it with something with more fat like a hanger steak - go ahead. Pork? Just about anything.
The marinade: whatever your marinade contains, it is going to penetrate the meat, minimally. So if it tastes mild, or even "edible" to you when you make it, it is going to be weak, or non-existent, when the meat has been marinated. So you have to make something REALLY strong and somewhat distasteful. Look at the marinade below and ask yourself: would you eat this?
Time. What you're trying to do, with a marinade, is get a flavor INSIDE a piece of meat. Meat, if you haven't noticed, is pretty dense. It takes a while for stuff to get into it . So when I marinade, I don't think in terms of hours: I think in terms of DAYS. The recipe described here involved sitting the pork tenderloin in the marinade for two full days. And it probably could have used another day or two.
Oh, one last thing: the most important thing perhaps: when you are marinating a protein, that marinade MUST have, in my experience, two components: an acid, and salt. The acid breaks down the meat structure a bit, making the whole process a bit simpler. The salt, to continue the breakdown of the tissue, and also to diffuse into the meat. When that happens, the diffusion continues with other liquids.

Okay, so here's mine. I had seville oranges left over from the great marmalade adventure of 2009. Latino cooking uses a lot of these with meat, so I squeezed two of them. Got a fair amount of juice too. If you don't have these, you can use a sweet orange, a lemon and a lime, to get just about the same effect. I combined this, with a tablespoon (yup, a tablespoon) of salt, a jalapeno pepper that was chopped roughly, with veins and seeds, Five peeled, whole crushed garlic cloves, six branches of fresh thyme and three bay leaves, cracked in half. Also a tablespoon of honey.

Sounds kind of vile, doesn't it? It was. It was NASTY. Exactly what I wanted. I put this all in a double plastic bag, with two tenderloins that weighed about a pound each, sealed it, put the whole thing in a bowl and refrigerated. If I remembered, I would squish the b ag a bit to redistribute things .

After two days, the meat had taken on a rather unattractive gray color. That was the work of the acid - a GOOD thing. Just like with a ceviche, the meat had "cooked a bit. It had also picked up the spice flavors somewhat, and some of the heat from the jalapeno.

I patted the tenderloins dry, and let them sit, at room temperature, for about an hour. I heated up a stovetop grill and also cranked the oven to 425. Remember: Start your meats on the stove, and finish them in the oven. You'll have much more control.

We oiled the grill pan . (Something else to remember: even though pork is fatty, it needs fat to cook. That fat in the meat is not going to cook it for you). When it was really hot, the Matts put the tenderloins down on the pan and seared them for about five minutes. The color, and the smell , were quite lovely. Then in the middle of a rodent fight, we turned them and let them cook for another three minutes, before putting them into the oven for ten.

When they came out of the oven, we let them sit for about ten minutes while we got the rest of the meal ready. This allowed the meat to reabsorb and redistribute the juices, and also let the tissue relax for easier cutting.

To my taste, there was a faint "echo" of the marinade. You knew it was there, but it wasn't overpowering, and while there was an "undertone" of heat, no one could say the pork was spicy in the sense we've all come to expect from jalapenos.

This was a good dish. But it points to the need for patience, a "Virtue" that Annalena continues to develop. As should you.

Tomorrow, blood orange cake. You'll be amazed. Really.

Mattmatt, I love yous.