Why You Should Add Honey To Your Steak Marinade
When you want to change the taste of meats, using a delicious marinade is one of the best ways to do so. Allowing your meats to bathe in a rich mixture of flavors will add a new depth for your taste buds. The structure of a marinade is simple. It is comprised of a trio of ingredients: an oil, an acid, and seasoning that can range from spices and salts to sweet components. But a good marinade will not only change the flavor of a food, it will also alter the texture in the best way possible. This is especially true with proteins like steak.
Marinades and perfectly cooked steaks of all different cuts go hand in hand. A marinade will infuse savory, sweet, and spicy elements, while tenderizing the meat in the process. How long you soak your steaks in these custom-made solutions can influence how tasty and juicy your meat is once it has been cooked. But the next time you are whipping one up, you might want to consider adding honey. Honey is a showstopper for meat. Its superpowers go beyond simply adding sweetness.
Honey helps lock in juices
Honey in a marinade can help keep all those delicious steak juices where they belong, inside the steak. This is largely due to the fact that honey is hygroscopic which means it attracts moisture and holds on to it as long as it can. When you use honey in a marinade for steak, it will help create that succulent bite of meat that makes your mouth water and what carnivore doesn't want that?
Honey is also the perfect sweet addition to a marinade where there isn't a lot of overly spicy ingredients that have you grabbing for a glass of water. Chalk this up to honey's sticky super glue-like properties, which help other seasonings and spices stick to the meat. This golden syrup also caramelizes when it cooks, helping to brown your favorite steaks, and creating a beautiful crust while adding a subtle sweetness.
Adding honey to a marinade for steaks also has other advantages. Because honey acts as a natural preservative, you can mix-up a batch of this liquid and store it in the fridge for up to a week in an airtight container, or even freeze it for later use.