A question about fats in marinades.
#85498 - 07/01/04 07:18 PM
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atomic rose
Reged: 06/01/04
Posts: 7013
Loc: Maine (IBS-A stable since July '05!)
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If a recipe calls for a marinade that's heavy in fats, how much of that fat is transferred to the meat as it marinates?
I avoid (or modify) oil-based marinades, but I have a recipe for grilled chicken that's soaked in a coconut-milk-based marinade for 4 hours. You remove the chicken, pat it dry, and then grill it - the marinade is discarded. Just curious. 
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This is a good question. I think I'll e-mail Cooking Light and ask them. They have answered my questions before.
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IBS-A for 20 years with terrible bloating and gas. On the diet since April 2004. Remember this from Heather's information pages:
"You absolutely must eat insoluble fiber foods, and as much as safely possible, but within the IBS dietary guidelines. Treat insoluble fiber foods with suitable caution, and you'll be able to enjoy a wide variety of them, in very healthy quantities, without problem." Please eat IF foods!
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"Anyone can exercise, but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline." -Garfield
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Any fats or oils used in a marinade contribute VERY little fat content to the meat in the marinade -- they do, however, contribute flavor (think about draping bacon over a beef roast and baking it and you get the idea) and they "carry" the flavor of other ingredients in the marinade. Think of it this way: if you take a jar of olive oil and stuff in a half dozen long sprigs of fresh rosemary, you get rosemary-infused yummy olive oil. Other stuff in a marinade (e.g. wine) doesn't get infused with flavors/seasonings the same way that oil does.
If you marinate chicken (for example) in oil and lemon juice and white wine, and then you take it out of the marinade and grill it, you're not going to be eating the oil and lemon and wine -- or the quantity of it would be so minuscule that it nearly doesn't count -- but you do get some seriously nice flavor, and the marinade contributes greatly to the FLAVOR of the chicken, even if you don't brush it on while grilling.
Speaking of which, you shouldn't really brush marinades onto meat (or veggies or whatever) while grilling, because it's likely that you have raw-meat bacteria in the marinade and it's not going to cook sufficiently on the grill if you're brushing it on there at the last minute. If you bake the chicken IN the marinade in the oven, it'll be okay. But if you want to brush stuff on while grilling, start fresh with a liquid or sauce or whatever that hasn't had raw meat soaking in it overnight.
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Kelly, thanks so much for the info! Do you think it's okay to brush meats with marinades that have been boiled for a few minutes to kill the bacteria? I've heard conflicting veiws on this so I'd like to hear your opinion. 
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"Anyone can exercise, but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline." -Garfield
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That's what I had thought all along - after all, baking chicken with the skin on contributes very little fat to the finished meat, as long as you don't eat the skin - but figured it couldn't hurt to get a second opinion.
Thanks for the info about marinades during grilling, too. I'm actually ULTRA-paranoid about meat, and so I never brush marinades during cooking anyway - I just omit that step if a recipe calls for it. It never seemed safe to me. Now I feel slightly vindicated. 
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Thanks for the oil-in-marinades information. I've been avoiding many delicious chicken preparations, such as Baja Fresh chicken tacos, or Gourmet Burritos because they are marinated using oil. Sometimes the rice is cooked using some amount of oil too. If I'm reading your post correctly, then these foods could be IBS safe with regard to the oil issue. Is that correct?
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I think you still need to be careful with the rice, jenkins, because unlike the chicken you're eating all the oil rather than just marinating something in it. The good news is most rice recipes are just as good if you reduce the oil to about 1 Tbsp!
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"Anyone can exercise, but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline." -Garfield
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welllllllllllllllllll ....... on the one hand, i suppose one could make the argument that boiling raw chicken juice makes it ok to eat.
on the other hand, why mess around? I'm not exactly paranoid, but i am CAREFUL. (When I mess with raw chicken in the kitchen, I'm like lunging for the antibacterial soap and hot water, thinking "raw chicken poison juice" in my mind.)
You only have to see 70 people in the ER from food poisoning to figure it out and get REALLY careful about this. (No, I didn't do it, but I got the job of the person who was drop-kicked off the job for that little fiasco.)
Anyway. Boiling a marinade and then brushing it onto grilling meat. It would have to be one really fancyass marinade in my mind before I'd do that -- like made with single malt scotch or something.
I smoke meats now and then and what I usually do is marinate the meat (say salmon) in one mixture (like lemon and garlic and pepper and white wine), then brush a second mixture (like pineapple juice and brown sugar and bourbon) on the meat while it's on the smoker.
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Thanks Kelly. I'm extremely anal about raw meat too, so I don't do that, but I thought I'd make sure I'm not just being too obsessive. It sounds like my careful attention is well founded, though! I'm just like you, I wash my hands a million times while I'm working with raw meats. You're right, you can never be too careful.
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"Anyone can exercise, but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline." -Garfield
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