Make Steak That's Tender And Bursting With Flavor With One Simple Onion Trick

No one wants to choke down a tough, flavorless, or lackluster piece of steak. Luckily, there's one simple trick that will make your next steak not only super tender, but also bursting with flavor. All you have to do is throw some onions on it — literally.

While this savory hack delivers on both taste and texture, it's also a really smart way to stretch your meat budget, allowing you to make due with lesser cuts of beef like round, chuck, flank, or skirt (all types of steak you should be tenderizing), without your family or your guests ever taking note. Whether the meat selection at your local grocer is lacking or you're just looking to save some dough in a tough economy, you'll more than make do — and all for just the price of an onion.

Though grilled onions and steak go beautifully together, this trick works exclusively with raw onion. This is because the enzymes in the raw onion break down the protein fibers in the steak, in essence tenderizing it, while also deeply imbuing it with that signature oniony-rich umami flavor steak lovers can't get enough of. This trick works best with very finely chopped onion; some folks even grate it. But if you want to serve the onion later, as an accompaniment to your steak, a fine chop works well too. You can even stack this trick with other ways to tenderize steak for best results.

To tenderize your meat using the onion technique, begin by scoring your steak on both sides (some will go the extra mile to also tenderize their steak with a good mallet beating before scoring). From there, you can just place your steak in a dish, coating both sides with the diced or pureed onion and cover with plastic wrap, allowing it to sit prior to cooking. While some tutorials recommend as little as 30 minutes to an hour, you can also let it go up to 2 hours. Since over-marinating is one of the biggest mistakes people make when tenderizing steak, you don't want to risk going longer and having the meat become mushy.

While this trick for marinating steak with onion is a good one, it's not a new one. In fact, it dates back to a dish called Chaliapin Steak which was invented in 1936 in Japan. It's named after the Russian opera singer, Feodor Chaliapin. Apparently, the legendary singer came to the Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo, to perform. He needed to eat but had a toothache, so he requested that the kitchen make his steak tender enough for him to be able to chew without causing him too much pain. The chef, at the time, came up with the idea of tenderizing the meat in this way. The recipe sparked renewed interest in modern times since it was revisited in the 2015 anime series "Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma."