Watch this video to learn how to make your own marinade for grilling meat and poultry. Chef David Kamen demonstrates the proper proportions of vinegar and oil, then mixes in herbs and spices like rosemary, sea salt and black pepper. Kamen suggests including any herbs, spices, condiments (such as Dijon mustard) or aromatics (like garlic) that suit your flavor preferences.
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Hi, I'm Chef Dave Kamen from the Culinary Institute of America, and I'm going to show you this kitchen basic: how to make a marinade for grilling.
Whenever you're grilling a steak or a piece of chicken, it's always nice to marinate that product before you start grilling. That'll help give you a really nice flavor. A little bit of oil in the marinade will also help keep the meat from sticking to the grill.
We're going to make a very simple, basic marinade today. We have some salt and some black pepper; we have some chopped-up herbs - this is some rosemary in here - and of course we have a little bit of vinegar and some olive oil. We're going to mix all that in this little bowl.
We're going to start with our herbs. This is about a tablespoon of chopped-up rosemary. Then we're going to add a small pinch of kosher salt, and an even smaller pinch of black pepper. Then we have about a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar here. We want to mix that all up real nice first, and then we're going to slowly add in about a cup of olive oil. You typically want about three parts oil to one part vinegar. You can use really whatever you want to use - any herbs that you like. If you wanted to add some garlic to this, that would certainly be fine, or a little bit of honey or even some dijon mustard; really, anything you want to use in your marinade is absolutely fine.
We're going to be adding this marinade today to some strip loin steaks, so I've got three nice thick strip loin steaks all ready for the grill. We want to pour the marinade right into the bag with them, and then we're going to carefully seal the bag so we don't get it all over the place. Get a little bit of the air out of the bag there, seal it, and then just kind of gently massage the marinade into the meat. Then we'll go ahead and put this into the refrigerator and let it flavor up for about an hour. And that's how you make a marinade for grilling.