The High Price Of Pre-Marinated Meat: A Cautionary Tale

You don’t find full-service butcher shops around much anymore, but there’s one about 40 miles from my house that sells fresh and smoked meats, sausages, bacon and fish at retail to the public, and butchers animals for ranchers and wild game for hunters. They have a deli counter where you can get a tasty tri-tip sandwich. Best of all, they sell pellet grills in front of the shop, so you know they’re legit.

One of the things this butcher shop is known for is their ready-to-grill marinated meats. A while back, I dropped in and without thinking about it too much bought a bag of marinated skirt steak.

Lesson #1: I Paid (A Lot) For Convenience

img_3863a-1024

This package of marinated skirt steak weighs 4.32 pounds and sells for $10.50 per pound. I get it. I’m paying a premium price for convenience.  Take it home and put it straight on the grill. But just for fun, let’s break it down a bit more.

img_3868-1024

Here’s how much liquid was left in the bag after I removed the skirt steak. It’s almost 20 fluid ounces—2-1/2 cups. Now, to be fair, some of that liquid is meat juices. Let’s be generous and subtract 20% for meat juices. That leaves 16 fluid ounces of actual marinade.

What does a fluid ounce of this marinade weigh? I don’t know because I didn’t weigh it at the time, but I weighed a similar marinade and it weighs about 1.5 ounces per fluid ounce. So 16 fluid ounces of marinade weighs about 24 ounces or 1-1/2 pounds. At $10.50 per pound, I paid $15.75 for the marinade in the measuring cup.

How does that compare to supermarket marinade? A 16 fluid ounce bottle of marinade at an expensive grocery store might cost $5.99. That’s the equivalent of about $4.00 per pound.

I paid almost four times the price for marinade in the pre-marinated meat than if I had used an expensive supermarket marinade.

Lesson #2: I Got Unevenly Marinated Meat

img_3872-1024

The skirt steak came out of the package as one long piece of meat. I cut it into the pieces shown here and patted them dry with paper towels.

Notice those bright red patches? Those are areas where the meat was folded over on itself and the marinade could not reach the meat. The result was uneven marination.

When you let someone else do the marinating for you, you have no control over how they do it. When you do it yourself, you can take steps to ensure that the meat is evenly marinated.

Lesson #3: Marinades Don’t Penetrate Deeply

img_3871-1024

Look at the cut end of this piece of skirt steak. It can’t be more than 1/2 inch thick at most. Who knows how many hours the meat was marinating before I bought it. And skirt steak is not exactly a tight-grained piece of meat. Yet the marinade barely penetrated the surface.

This illustrates and confirms the findings of experts like Cook’s Illustrated magazine that marinades do not deeply penetrate most meats—they only affect the surface and just below the surface.

Lesson #4: It Tasted Great

img_3881-1024

It cost a lot. It wasn’t evenly marinated. It wasn’t deeply marinated. So how did it turn out? It tasted great.

I grilled the pieces over medium-high heat to medium doneness. The meat was moist and juicy, a bit fatty like a good skirt steak should be, with some crispy edges that were to die for. As for the Asian marinade, it was really delicious and added some good heat.

IMG_3883-1024

To be clear, I had absolutely no issues with the quality of this meat or marinade. But will I buy it again? No, because I’m a cheapskate.

Here’s the bottom line: It pays—literally—to consider the real price of convenience before buying pre-marinated meat. Marinating meat is easy to do at home, and you’ll save a ton of money.

If you’re looking for a good book on marinades, consider this new one from “Dr. BBQ” Ray Lampe.

Safe Cooking Temperatures For Pork Chops & Roasts

img_1988-1024
Pork tenderloin steaks

It wasn’t that long ago that for the sake of food safety, the USDA wanted us to cook pork chops and roasts to 160°F . The result: Lots of tough, dry pork all across this great land of ours.

The good news is that a few years ago, the USDA aligned its recommendations for safe pork with what many chefs and food experts had been saying all along: That whole muscle cuts like pork chops, pork loin roasts, and pork tenderloin are safe when cooked to 145°F—a full 15°F lower than the old recommendation.

Bruce Aidells, author of The Great Meat Cookbook, suggests cooking lean cuts of pork to 135-140°F, then removing the meat from the grill and allowing residual heat to bring the final internal temp to 145°F during a short rest before serving.

img_1989-1024

And there’s no need to worry about trichinosis. That’s something our grandparents used to worry about when it came to pork, but it just doesn’t happen in our domestic pork supply today. Most cases that occur in the U.S.—about 20 per year—are associated with eating raw or undercooked wild game meats. On the grill, cooking pork to an internal temp of 138°F and holding at that temp for a few minutes kills trichinosis. So if you’re finishing pork at 140-145°F you’re good to go.

img_1990-1024

As always, a good quality instant-read thermometer is the key to achieving food-safe temps when grilling any meat.

Baking Steel For Grilled Pizza

Baking Steel by Stoughton Steel

In a recent post, I featured a technique for grilling pizza on a Weber Genesis gas grill. Shortly after that post, America’s Test Kitchen Radio reviewed the Baking Steel by Stoughton Steel. They say it’s far superior to a pizza stone and helps you make pizza as crispy as any pizzeria out there.

Baking Steel is 1/4 inch thick

The Baking Steel is a 1/4″ thick piece of steel measuring 16″ x 14″ and weighing an impressive 15 pounds. It gets so ripping hot that it bakes pizza up to 2x faster than a pizza stone and results in a taller, more crispy crust. It can also double as a griddle.

The Baking Steel by Stoughton Steel is available at Amazon.com.

Weber Grill Haiku

How I hate that smell
How I hate that smell

Recently I was grilling burgers when I lifted the lid and was suddenly reminded of this haiku I wrote in 2014. Please enjoy.

Arm Hair

I lift the grill lid
Singeing hairs on my forearm
How I hate that smell