Tips

Upgrade your beef marinade: Don’t just rely on salt, try adding this for tender and flavorful meat

Contrary to popular belief, marinating beef with only salt will result in tough and bland meat. To enhance its flavor and tenderness, you can add a variety of spices during the cooking process, ensuring that the meat remains juicy, flavorful, and nutritious.

Administrator

6 February, 2024

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As a delicious and nutritious food, beef is a common ingredient in every family’s meal. From this ingredient, you can create many delicious dishes such as stir-fried beef with vegetables, grilled beef skewers, beef and mushroom rolls, beef kimchi soup… Each cooking method brings you a different and incredibly delicious flavor.

Although it is commonly consumed, not every homemaker knows how to prepare this ingredient. With its characteristic toughness, if cooked incorrectly, your dish will be tough and dry. Especially, during the marinating process, many people believe that adding a little salt will make the beef more flavorful, but they forget that salt will dehydrate the beef, making it even tougher and drier. To ensure that the beef is always tender, juicy, and flavorful after cooking, you need to follow the steps below.

Ingredients

– Beef

– Lime

– Sugar

How to marinate beef

Step 1: Prepare the beef

After buying the beef, wash it thoroughly. Then soak it in a bowl of water with a few drops of lime for about 15 minutes. Take out the beef, rinse it with clean water, and slice it into bite-sized pieces that are suitable for cooking. This method helps remove excess blood from the meat and eliminate the characteristic smell of beef.

Step 2: Marinate the beef

Put the sliced beef in a bowl, then add a little sugar and use chopsticks to mix well so that the sugar absorbs into the meat. Marinate for about 15 to 20 minutes. Thanks to the sugar marination, the beef fibers will become tender quickly, making the meat sweet, delicious, and retain its nutritional value during cooking. Especially, do not add salt to marinate the beef together because salt contains a lot of soluble substances that can force the water out of the beef, making the meat dry and affecting its taste.

Moreover, if you want the beef to have a more aromatic flavor, you can also add some ginger and garlic and marinate them together with the beef.

Some notes to make the beef always tender and flavorful

– No matter how you slice the beef for cooking, whether thinly or thickly, you should always slice it against the grain because cutting it parallel to the fibers will make the meat tough and hard to chew.

– Each dish requires a different cooking time, so you should pay attention to the cooking time based on the cooking method.

– If you want the beef to be tender, you can add pineapple juice when marinating the beef or add a few slices of green papaya skin while cooking. In addition, for braised beef dishes, if you find the beef to be too tough, you can rub a layer of baking soda on the meat, marinate for about 5-6 hours, then rinse and put it in the pot to braise.

– To make the beef more tender during cooking, after adding the spices, you can add 1 to 2 tablespoons of cooking oil to the bowl. However, you should not add too much oil to marinate the beef, just enough to coat the meat with a thin layer.

Source: Xe và thể thao