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Everyone knows you can't just throw meat on the grill. You need to spend hours marinating it, giving it precious time in the fridge to infuse that protein with flavor.
Or do you? It's time to dethrone that BBQ mainstay: The marinade.
According to grilling experts Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, authors of The Big-Flavor Grill: No-Marinade, No-Hassle Recipes, marinating is more than a mere exercise in futility. It can actually make your food taste worse. Read through their reasons, and you'll never soak a pork loin in a bottle’s worth of goopy Italian salad dressing (or a lovely lemon-herb marinade) again.
It's a painful but inescapable truth: Marinades only really flavor the surface of the meat, never really penetrating deeply to the interior. Opt instead for a spice rub, which delivers a much more powerful burst of flavor.
Yes, spice rubs, applied with or without a bit of oil, "provide stronger, better-defined flavors than marinades," write Schlesinger and Willoughby. "They also stick better to the surface of foods, which intensifies the flavor." What's more, you can assemble and apply a rub in the time it takes for the grill to heat up. No more waiting.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, rubs help the meat develop a satisfying crust, which brings me to the next myth:
Just like marinades only flavor the surface of the meat, they can only tenderize the surface, too. And in fact, if left for too long, marinades can make the meat somewhat mushy, write Schlesinger and Willoughby. And doesn't "Spice-Crust King" sound better than "Mushy-Meat Master?" (Spoiler: The answer is yes.)
Marinating a piece of meat that already tends to be tender—like filet or a ribeye—is wasted effort. And marinating a tougher cut—a tri-tip or skirt steak—is wasted effort, too, since cooking it to the right temperature and slicing it across the grain are far more reliable ways to nail tender steak.
No matter how long you bathe your chicken, beef, or pork it won't make it more juicy. The juiciness of a meat comes from quality meat, ample fat, and proper cooking, point out Schlesinger and Willoughby. What a marinade can do is make your meat soggy, causing it to steam rather than sear when it hits the grill if you neglect to blot off all that marinade.
Instead of taking way too long trying to infuse flavor into raw meat, take the opposite approach: Once your meat is cooked, add extra juiciness and flavor with a zesty sauce instead. Perhaps that vinaigrette that you didn't use as a marinade; or a salsa or a chimichurri or a compound butter. All of these options taste better and require less time than your average marinade. Plus, with no marinade required, a last-minute cook-out is but a butcher-shop stop away.
