Easy Marinade Recipes for the Home Cook

Super simple marinade recipes will lead from this page.

We aim at easy marinade recipes for the home cook and since you will probably use a finishing sauce or a "binder", that's all you'll need. Match the marinade to what you have on hand be it beef steak, chicken, pork or fish. Free yourself from the tyranny of the cookbook. Cook by intuition with Formula Easy Recipes.

Or, jump to specfic and easy marinades Part 1

Because our mission is to free the home cook from cookbooks, this page is a general discussion of marinade recipes and vinaigrettes. Take a good look at your spices and herbs because there is almost no limit to the ideas you can come up with to make your own signature recipe for marinades.

However, to get you started this chapter will link to a number of pages giving you the specific ingredients for many different flavors.

There are two kinds of greasy and slippery substances used in cooking. Those which are solid at room temperature are generally called fats, and those which are liquid at room temperature are called oils. When you mix an oil with some kind of acid (lemon juice, vinegar and wine are good examples) together with herbs, spices and a handful of condiments and finely chopped vegetables (such as garlic, onions, or ginger) the result is called a marinade.

You can refer to this chart for how long to marinade different proteins. Another useful chart is the smoking temperatures of oils which will be discussed on this future page.

A vinaigrette is basically nothing more exciting than a simple marinade. Vinaigrettes are also good as salad dressings or to add some flavor to simply prepared vegetables.

When you mix an acid with some water and an oily substance you'll notice that they separate in the jar or bottle. This is because they have different densities. There is a gadget for that and at FERC we love our gadgets.

One of the most delicious fats is lard. Lard comes from animal fats and is terrible for you and will clog up your arteries very quickly. However, it is a sad truth that most of the flavor of any dish comes from the fat it contains -- fortunately, not all fats clog. Fats that come from plant oils tend to be polyunsaturated - or monounsaturated.