I never used to marinate meat, even in my grilling heyday back when I lived in Los Angeles.
I sort of felt, you know: uggg, how annoying to have to a) have to buy all those extra ingredients, b) put in the extra time and effort to marinate, and c) have to wash out a Ziploc afterwards, because I can’t help myself: I am just a person who cannot throw away a Ziploc bag. (But I also hate washing them so much that I usually end up abandoning any and all efforts to use them entirely. Which means that there are lots of poorly Saran-wrapped and largely unidentifiable things sitting in our refrigerator at this very moment.)
And I also thought that it couldn’t really make that big of a difference. This is also why I am a hit-and-miss (more often miss) baker: if I can’t see (or taste) an immediate reward to adding an ingredient to a dish, I sometimes just…skip it. Like yeast. I skipped that once, when making rolls. (Don’t do that.)
As it turns out, though, marinating meat hovers somewhere around Zero on the effort scale, is totally fun and fills my improvisational inclinations nicely (you can just poke around in the refrigerator for a bunch of things that sound like they might taste good on meat, and they probably will), and also?
It makes a huge difference.
Huge.
Let me show you:
This is the (marinated) skirt steak I made for Kendrick the other night.
And this is him literally grabbing my leg over how delicious it was.
LEG-GRABBINGLY MARVELOUS MARINADE
Just pick up skirt steak, cut the strip into three pieces of more or less equal length, and put the meat in a plastic bag with the following:
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup soy sauce
3-4 finely diced garlic cloves
1 tbsp brown sugar
A good shake of season salt
Salt
Let it sit in the refrigerator for at least a couple of hours, shaking occasionally if you remember to, and then grill the meat for just a few minutes on each side (skirt steak is super thin so it won’t take long).
Serve over arugula dressed with olive oil, fresh lemon juice, salt, and pepper.
