Why Do Recipes Lie and Lie About Marinating Meat?

To be a home cook is to be in a constant state of exasperation. Mincing garlic is a pain, so is blitzing a soup, ladleful by ladleful, in a blender, and nobody on earth enjoys peeling carrots. (Do not get me started on the arthritis-inducing process of forging a roux from a chalky mixture of flour and butter.) But honestly, when I search for a new recipe, nothing—nothing—takes the wind out of my sails quite like a marinade.

Yes, the method is low-impact and impossible to botch—you combine a cut of meat with a frothy meld of flavors and leave them to mingle in the refrigerator—but the end result, and the onerous time commitment, has been forever dubious to me. When I read a mandate to marinate the chicken thighs, or flank steaks, or pork belly for “at least six hours” or “ideally overnight,” I fall back on my base assumptions: There is simply no way a liquid nap makes that much of a difference.

And so, for years now, I’ve been something of a marination truther. My seasonings are applied to my future dinner about 10 minutes before it hits the oven—the oils, herbs, and sugars are given almost no time to integrate deep into the muscle fibers—and it always tastes pretty good. Would the Sichuan chicken I made last week possess greater complexities if I left it to rest in its milieu of fish sauce, Shaoxing wine, and chili-bean paste for several hours before roasting? Perhaps, but I guarantee the difference would be minor to the point of fabrication—the implicit bias to prefer a $20 bottle of wine over the $14 alternative.

I know I’m not making any allies with this opinion. Marination, in some form or fashion, is a fixture of dozens of different proud epicurean traditions (Jamaican jerk, Indian tandoori, France’s poulet de Provençal), and I would never question the wisdom of those who have dedicated their lives to perfecting a precise blend of spice and richness. What I will argue is that for our purposes—bumbling amateurs in a home kitchen, winding back an Alison Roman video on our phones—we likely don’t need to be worrying about the marination process at all.

Of course, when I called up Dan Souza, editor in chief of Cook’s Illustrated, and cast member on America’s Test Kitchen, I was expecting to be told that I was flatly incorrect about all of these assumptions, and that my skepticism about marination was simply the symptom of my own pigheadedness and lack of dedication to the craft. But let me tell you: I am more right than you think I am.

Souza told me that all flavor molecules are not created equal, and therefore, not all marinades are created equal. Some of those molecules, like the ingredients that prod our basic taste senses—sweet, salty, sour, umami—can dissolve in water. A cut of meat, like the rest of the human race, is mostly made up of water, so a marinade containing those ingredients can work its way to the bone if given enough time. Souza asks us to think of corned beef, which is soaked in sodium for days before it’s prepared, and clearly carries that flavor profile. “Something is clearly happening there,” he told me.

However, Souza notes that some of the basic fixtures that come to mind when we think about a marinade—garlic, paprika, dried oregano, and so on—are made up of flavor molecules that dissolve into fat much more easily than they dissolve into water. (That’s why you and I can whip up a quick chili oil on the stovetop whenever we want.) But a chicken thigh, or a pork shoulder, or any other hunk of animal protein, does not contain nearly the same fat content as, say, a saucepan sizzling with brown butter. Furthermore, the fat that is present in those cuts of meat is solid, not liquid. What that means is the awesome 30-part marinade you concocted—featuring, like, cocoa imported directly from the Cook Islands—will mostly stick to the surface of whatever you’re cooking, not melt into the meat. Yes, it might still taste great, but you’re not going to harvest that fully permeated richness that most of us fantasize about. (I hate to say I told you so!)

“If you’re marinating something for 12 hours, and you expect the center of your meat to taste like the smoked paprika and cumin you put into the mixture, you’re going to be like, ‘This doesn’t taste like those spices, this is a joke,’ ” said Souza.

Greg Brockman, who works at the vaunted Prospect Butcher Co. in Brooklyn, echoes Souza’s point. “Marinating is of dubious benefit,” he told me. “A highly striated muscle, like a skirt, has lots of nooks and crannies for a marinade to get in there, more so than a tenderloin. But with a whole muscle, you’re not going to get a lot of flavor penetration. The short answer with whether or not marination works is a yes with an ‘and,’ and the long answer is a no with a ‘but.’ ”

That isn’t necessarily a problem. Seasoned protein tastes good, even if it’s only slathered on the exterior. “You get a ton of surface area on every bite,” Souza said. For what it’s worth, Cook’s Illustrated typically prints recipes that call for a marination process that lasts between 30 minutes and an hour. There are a million variables in the margins—the size of the meat, the acidity of the mixture, your preferred level of saltiness—but, generally speaking, Souza is of the belief that you can “get a lot done” in that time frame.

Souza is also aware that many of the orthodoxies around cooking, including the two-day marinades that could be truncated down into something much more sensible, are intractable. Are you really going to tell your aunt and uncle that all of that garlic powder isn’t going to sink past the skin? No! And also, that’s not the point Souza wants to make.

“Eating is such a complex experience. You have the taste, the smell, and all of your memories,” he said. “At the end of the day, does it give you pleasure? And is part of that pleasure doing it the way your mom did it?”

My mom is a great cook, and I cannot wait for the next time she plates a delicious coq au vin in front of me, even if the sprigs of thyme weren’t doing what she thought they were doing. In my kitchen, however, I will continue to pioneer my own tradition: preparing an impeccably seasoned rack of chicken thighs roughly 45 minutes before I intend to serve them.