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asian marinade

For your grilling pleasure – Asian marinades and cooking styles to use this summer

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People have been marinating meat for a long time. The word “marinade” is derived from the Latin term for seawater, aqua marina, a language evolution that is connected to the long-used practice of brining meat. Brining involves salt or saltwater and was primarily used to preserve meat so that it would last longer. It is also believed that brining was used to add flavor to poultry, fish and other meats.

While brining has been used in areas close to the sea, like areas bordering the Mediterranean, the process of marination is a global phenomenon. Whether done to add flavor or to tenderize meat, most marinades and meat sauces contain some acidic or enzymatic ingredients such as lemon juice, red wine, vinegar, ginger or fruits.

Southeast Asian marinades are sweet and savory, due to their propensity to include soy, ginger, and fruits. Marinades that come from tropical islands tend to rely heavier on fruits like pineapple and papaya, while marinades in western Asia rely more heavily on curry, a combination of turmeric, fresh ginger, chilis, and cumin.

Marinades and sauces of Asia — heavy on the soy

Soy sauce marinades

Many Asian marinades are sweet and savory, and, at times, spicy. Some of the more popular marinades from Asia are sauces used as condiments or added after cooking. A large number of marinades and sauces that derive from Asia are made from soybeans or their byproducts.

Soy sauce was first made in China and is believed to have first been created almost 2,000 years ago. Soy sauce is also derived from soybeans. It is fermented soybeans with grains, some salt/brine, and even mold cultures like Aspergillus oryzae or Aspergillus sojae. Although it originated in China, the use of soy sauce spread rapidly across southeast Asia and eventually made its way to Europe.

In Chinese cuisine, there are many different types of soy sauce that can be used in dishes featuring vegetables, pork, chicken, beef or fish. It is one of the most commonly used “spices” in food originating in China. In Japanese culture, soy sauce is prominent in what is known as the teriyaki style of cooking, which involves grilling or broiling glazed foods with the namesake teriyaki sauce that is a combination of soy sauce, sugar, and sake or mirin. Teriyaki-style and the simple marinade used for cooking is great with some chicken breasts (thinned of course), steaks, or pork tenderloin.

For other marinades, soy sauce is combined with sesame oil, sesame seeds, green onions, ginger, and sometimes fish sauce or hot chili sauce.

Soy sauce is not the secret ingredient for Chinese and Japanese cuisines only; its use is widespread across southeast Asia and is even a key ingredient in many traditional Hawaiian dishes.

Beyond China and Japan, soy sauce is used to marinate beef — with brown sugar, garlic, rice wine vinegar, ginger, sesame oil, and freshly ground black pepper — for Korean barbecue. In Indonesia and the Philippines, soy sauce is most commonly mixed with brown sugar and sometimes molasses and used as a marinade.

Soy sauce is used in marinades outside of Asia, as many steakhouses use soy sauce in some of their steak marinades across Europe and America.

Hoisin

Hoisin is a sweet and salty Chinese sauce is most often added as a glaze after cooking. Most commonly made with some combination of vinegar, soybeans, fennel seeds, red chilis, and minced garlic, it is used primarily as a dipping sauce or glaze.  However, hoisin is also used in stir-frys and as a barbecue sauce.

As a marinade, Hoisin sauce is best for pork chops or fried or grilled chicken thighs or tenders. Some chefs experimenting with hoisin have combined it with fresh garlic cloves, chilis, and some sugar for a pre-cooking marinade for steak tips, tougher steaks like skirt steak, and even rib-eye.

Interestingly, the word hoisin is Chinese for “seafood,” yet it contains no fish and is used on other meats like pork, duck, and beef more prevalently than seafood. Fish sauce, which is very salty like soy sauce, is a completely different Chinese condiment.

Indian-inspired flavor

Heading west, you find fewer beef marinades and more sauces used for fish and chicken. One major reason for this is the influence of Hinduism — which prohibits eating cattle — in countries like India. Chicken dishes that derive from India, such as tikka masala and tandoori chicken, rely on marinades that combine a range of different spices with yogurt. Both tikka masala and tandoori are marinated in a yogurt-based sauce that can include ginger, chilis, cayenne, cumin, turmeric, minced garlic, and sometimes coconut and cinnamon.

These foods that rely on what are known as “curry” marinades or sauces are most often used on chicken or fish. However, because of religious beliefs, the eating of meat is forbidden in some circles, and so this popular sauce is also used in vegetable dishes.

Middle Eastern and Mediterranean marinades

In Mediterranean Asia, the shawarma cooking style is one of the most popular ways to cook meat like chicken, beef, turkey, or lamb. The meat for shawarma usually is marinated in spices similar to Indian cuisines; they use a marinade or rub that is some combination of turmeric, cayenne, garlic, cumin, paprika, and olive oil.

Once marinated, the meat is packed onto a spit and then grilled over a long period of time, such as an entire day. This style of cooking eventually gained popularity in Mediterranean Europe; if you’ve ever eaten a Greek gyro or kebab, you’ve had the meat cooked shawarma-style and combined with a yogurt-based sauce and fresh vegetables.

Interestingly, the shawarma method of cooking is also connected to Latin American cuisine. Al pastor — a popular Mexican pork dish used in tacos — is supposed to be cooked on a spit and is prepared in a shawarma-like marinade that often adds pineapple. How did that happen? Lebanese refugees who arrived in Mexico in the twentieth century combined the cuisine of their home with the fruit and spice influences they discovered in Latin America.

Try out an Asian marinade

Now that you have a whole plethora of different flavors to try with your grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, and heritage-breed pork this summer., it’s time to make like a true chef and get to mixing these amazing marinades together. Whether you let them marinate for an hour or an entire day, once you pull your Asian-influenced meat off the grill, you’ll thank us.

Check out some of our favorite recipes and cooking methods from ButcherBox Head Chef Yankel Polak for a deeper dive into Asian marinades. 

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steak marinade

Make a great chicken, pork, or grass-fed steak marinade for a mouthwatering meal

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Quality chicken, pork, and beef can often be thrown directly on the grill without any seasoning — or with just a pinch of kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper — and taste amazing. But, an excellent homemade steak marinade — for instance — can take your meat to the next level.

Many steaks can be immensely improved with a little kitchen creativity and some minced garlic or soy sauce. This is especially true of skirt steak, flank steak, and similar tougher cuts with lots of connective tissues.

But if you really want to pack flavor into a grass-fed, grass-finished steak or some pasture-raised, heritage-breed pork or free-range chicken, a little knowledge of how marinades work and which flavor combinations are best can make a standard weeknight meal into a savory, memorable culinary experience.

Is it necessary to marinate steak, pork, or chicken?

Why marinate, you ask? Marinating before grilling is an excellent way to add additional flavors and to get more tender meat.

Marinades work well because of the natural attributes of beef, chicken, and pork, according to Head ButcherBox Chef Yankel Polak. “The longer you leave a protein in a marinade the more flavor it should absorb,” he explains, “and, what’s more, marinating will tenderize a tougher cut of meat.”

The problem is that, in reality, most marinades only penetrate about 2 millimeters deep. “And, get this,” Chef Yankel says, “it all happens in the first few seconds.”

So, while many people think that marinating meat for extended periods of time, or even overnight, is the key to having meat with fantastic flavor, that’s not actually the case. “While there is nothing wrong with preparing your ingredients the day before, remember that a good marinade only needs minimal contact with your protein to do everything it’s supposed to do,” according to Chef Yankel.

A good marinade enhances flavors

While there are many options for chicken or steak marinades, you can pull right off the shelf of your grocery store to have a pretty good meal, making your own marinades is healthier and leads to more flavorful pork chops or a nice juicy steak.

If you can, try to keep the marinades as natural as possible. It would be foolish to take a nice cut of grass-fed steak or heritage-breed pork and then douse it with some combination of corn syrup and lab-made additives.

Keep in mind that different cuts and types of meat have different flavor profiles. Some flavors will work best with, say, a flank steak more so than a ribeye, and vice versa.

“Think about the item you are cooking, whether that’s chicken, beef, or pork, and use ingredients in your marinade that will complement the flavor,” Chef Yankel says.

Flavor profiles for each type of meat

According to our chef, the best complementary flavor profiles are citrus for chicken, sweet flavors for pork, and marinades that are rich and savory for beef, especially grilled steaks.

This is why lime and lemon juices go great with other spices in chicken marinades; pineapple, brown sugar, and maple are great to have in pork marinades; and balsamic vinegar, minced garlic, and mushroom flavors work well as steak marinades.

“While they don’t alter the internal structure of the meat,” Chef Yankel adds, “acidic elements in marinades will certainly give you that extra punch of flavor — the ‘wow’ factor that accompanies that first bite.”

Some flavors that can’t be made from scratch — unless you have time to ferment malt vinegar, molasses, anchovies, and tamarind extract for 18 months. So it is okay to mix some natural ingredients like rosemary or fresh lemon juice with a good soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce.

Using a homemade marinade on your grass-fed steak can change a mundane meal into something otherworldly. Experiment and you might discover unexpected flavor combinations that work wonders for your palate.

And, to save you some precious time, now you also know that you don’t even have to marinate for too long to get those flavorful benefits.

Watch Chef Yankel break down his favorite marinades for chicken, pork, and beef here. In the video below check out an easy steak marinade — that has very little prep time —featuring garlic, cilantro, lime zest and olive oil. According to Yankel, that’s all you need for a delicious steak every time.

Also, here is Chef Yankel’s favorite one-hour steak marinade recipe for grilling New York strip steaks:

  • 3 limes, both zest and juice
  • 1 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 1 head of minced garlic
  • 1 tablespoon black pepper
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup parsley, chopped
  • 1/4 cup chives, chopped
  • 4 tablespoons tarragon, chopped
  • 4 tablespoons dill, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons whole grain mustard
  • 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
  • 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
  • 1 tablespoon fresh ground black pepper
  1. Combine all marinade ingredients in small bowl. Mix well and coat steaks thoroughly.
  2. Allow steaks to marinate in a refrigerator at least one hour, then bring steaks to room temperature before cooking.
  3. Grill the strip steaks over charcoal or an open flame for 4 to 6 minutes per side, or until internal temperature reads 120°F. Rest steak 8 minutes before serving.

You can find more recipes here. Happy eating!

 

ribeye roast

Ribeye roast – For special occasions, Sunday dinner, or anytime

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Don’t miss a special Ribeye Roast recipe from ButcherBox Head Chef Yankel Polak at the bottom of this post.

Here at ButcherBox, we believe the best way to bring friends together is over a delicious cut of grass-fed, grass-finished beef.

Our favorite cut to share with others is the ribeye roast. Perfectly-cooked, the ribeye roast goes well with an array of side dishes, red wine, and good friends.

What exactly is a ribeye roast?

Ribeye roasts — and ribeye steaks — come from the rib section of the cow, as the name implies. Specifically, ribeye roasts come from between the sixth and twelfth rib. It is a well-marbled section of muscle that is comprised of the longissimus dorsi, complexus, and spinalis muscles of a cattle. Ribeyes come in a number of different cuts and go by a few different names.

Most ribeye roasts are large, boneless cuts that have generous marbling and are best cooked over a few hours time. Traditionally the cut was used only on special occasions; a beef ribeye roast would be coated with salt and ground black pepper, spend an entire day in a roasting pan, and then be sliced up and presented as Sunday dinner or the centerpiece of a holiday meal.

Some roasts come with the bones included, and in this form is called standing rib roast and sometimes prime rib. It can also, confusingly, be called prime rib without the bone, and to add a level of complexity can be referred to as a roast beef mainly because it is beef roasted in an oven. (Check out our piece on often confused cuts for some clarification on the difference between prime rib roast and ribeye steak.)

The ribeye can be cut into steaks and cooked on a grill — with or without the bone — and has enough fatty, flavorful marbling that it needs little more than a pinch of sea salt and black pepper to make it a tender, mouthwatering treat.

A section of the ribeye can also be further cut down into a hard to find cut of steak known as the ribeye cap. The cut comes from the most tender part of this large muscle known as the spinalis dorsi that is highly-sought-out by discerning steak aficionados. The cut also goes by other names across the globe, including “Scottish fillet” in its boneless steak roast form.

Enough about the details of the ribeye, let’s get to the important stuff: How to prepare a delicious ribeye roast.

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How to cook a ribeye roast

You can order ribeye steaks from a butcher, or cut up a ribeye into steaks if you don’t want to put effort into roasting the cut. However, putting a little time and effort into the roast will pay off in the form of smooth, rich, well-marbled beef that you can easily slice up and serve to a number of dinner guests.

According to our Head Chef Yankel Polak, our ButcherBox boneless ribeye roast is a “breathtakingly marbled and tender hunk of meat.”

It can be prepared in numerous ways. For example, you can cook a ribeye roast in a slow cooker with some spices like fresh rosemary, minced garlic, and some vegetables. However, ribeye roast can be a bit too expensive to cook in this manner. “Pot roast,” beef usually tenderized by a day spent in a slow cooker is best with tough, less inherently flavorful cuts like chuck roast and shoulder steaks.

Below is ButcherBox Chef Yankel’s “Super Easy Ribeye Roast With Roasted Mushrooms and Eggplant.” This recipe serves eight, takes 20 minutes to prepare, and after two and half hours of cooking time, you’ll have a tender roast. It is quite simple and the perfect way to show off your cooking skills and delicious ButcherBox grass-fed beef.

The key is Chef Yankel’s use of a reverse-searing method, which allows you to sear the ribeye roast and let sit until it needs its final 15 minutes of cooking.

According to Chef Yankel, this will give you a medium-rare roast with a delicious brown crust. Also, he says, “This recipe won’t keep you stuck in the kitchen all night if you have guests.”

Super Easy Ribeye Roast With Roasted Mushrooms and Eggplant

Ingredients:

Beef Rub:

  • 1 ButcherBox Ribeye Roast
  • 3 Tbsp kosher salt  
  • 2 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 2 Tbsp onion powder
  • 2 Tbsp paprika
  • 2 Tbsp olive oil

Roasted Mushrooms and Eggplant

  • 2 lbs mushrooms, assorted variety, cut into similar size pieces
  • 4 Japanese eggplants, halved lengthwise
  • 6 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 shallots, minced
  • 3 Tbsp fresh thyme, chopped
  • 3 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
  • 4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 2 Tbsp sherry vinegar (or red wine vinegar)
  • salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

  1. Mix all ribeye rub ingredients and rub all over ribeye roast. Refrigerate on lowest shelf uncovered overnight. Remove from fridge 1 hr before roasting.
  2. Preheat oven to 250°F. Roast ribeye in a roasting pan until meat thermometer inserted into thickest part reads 115°F. Remove from oven and let rest for at least 20 min. The ribeye can sit out up to 2 hrs or be refrigerated until Step 7. If refrigerating, make sure to bring the ribeye back to room temperature before reheating.
  3. Preheat oven to 425°F.
  4. Mix all ingredients for the roasted vegetables except for the vinegar, then spread the vegetables evenly on sheet pans in a single layer.
  5. Roast vegetables in oven until lightly browned. Eggplant should be tender and mushrooms should shrink to half their original size.
  6. Remove vegetables from oven, sprinkle with vinegar and set aside.
  7. Place roast back in the oven and cook for an additional 15 min, until internal temperature is 125°F and the top is browned and crisp.
  8. Let ribeye roast rest for at least 20 min before carving. Happy Eating!

You can also check out Chef Yankel going through the steps of cooking a “Pan Seared Ribeye with Potatoes and Mushrooms”: