Marinade Miscellany (and homemade Jerk Paste)

 

What's a marinade? Broadly, a suspension of several liquids and solids designed for multiple purposes and to have multiple effects on food.

What's in a marinade? 4 obligatory components: Oil, Acid, Seasoning, and Flavoring. Quantities and specifics are left up to the creator, enabling enormous versatility.

What do you do with it? So long as you know what they always do, anything else you like!

1. The Oil: It can also be for flavor, but its primary purpose is to ensure the marinade makes better and more uniform contact with every available surface- a transfer medium.
2. The Acid: It is also significantly for flavor, but functions as a tenderizer for proteins. It can be used to ensure superior texture in tough cuts of meat, but also risks the denaturing of it if immersed too long or in too potent an intensity. A deliberate example of the last can be readily found in ceviche, wherein acids are used to 'cook' fish in lieu of heat application.
3. The Seasoning: Simply salt, and for some people pepper. A flavor enhancer and water extractor, salt amplifies the effects of all the other components. Strictly speaking, there are sufficient pseudo-salts that granulated isn't always necessary, but a neutral salt never hurts for balance.
4. The Flavoring: That's everything else. Give your dish what it needs to take it where you want to go!

The marinating process can be fast or slow, depending on the ingredients and intended target. To help contextualize, marinades are for more than meat- almost all salad dressings qualify as marinades as well. Since more delicate items like greens don't leave much time for them to work, they tend to be very potent in flavor. 

There are plenty of interesting ways to adjust marinades for your needs and desires, but one of the most common for me is finding a way to use the marinade to avoid waste. Often, it'd be as part of a cooking liquid for the marinated item, or cooked into a sauce for it.

While marinades tend to be mostly water-based liquids, the quantity of flavorings can be used to change the physical structure of it too, as I'll show in this example below: 

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This is my baseline recipe for Jamaican Jerk Paste. It's thin enough to use as a marinade, and thick enough that you can leave it on when cooking. It's not blazing hot spice wise, but you can adjust your chile type and quantity for your own preferences.

• 2 bunches Cilantro (stems and all)
• 6 Garlic cloves, 5 Scallions (all but the roots)
• 2 Serrano Chiles, stemmed and seeded
• 1/4 cup each neutral oil and vinegar (I use rice vinegar; distilled white vinegar is more common)
• 4 teaspoons Allspice, finely ground.

Coarsely chop all plant solids, season very lightly with salt to cause water leech.
Combine all ingredients and blend till emulsified. Taste and season- be aggressive.
Cover and allow to ferment at room temperature for 24 hours before using or refrigerating.

Jerk away~

Chicken thighs and drumsticks, marinated for 24 hours, roasted at 425F / 220C for 20-25 minutes, then carefully finished under the broiler for a little color and evaporation. Delicious.