Freak369's Full Review: Kikkoman Marinade Mix for Meat
I am lucky to have a couple of great butcher shops in my area as well as three grocery stores that have well stocked meat departments. Even so, there are times when I just can't pay four dollars a pound for a great steak or fresh cut pork chops. I started getting different cuts of meat to try out recipes with; some turned out like shoe leather and others were pretty good. A slow cooker is probably the best way to go with tough cuts of meat but that gets boring after a while. As much as I love a good roast with potatoes, eating that once a week just isn't an option. I'd used several marinades from Kikkoman in the past and never had any problems with them so I decided to grab a few packets to try out with pork chops, thinly sliced chicken breasts and 'breakfast steaks' that were on sale for $1.29 a pound. I pan fried a couple of these and they were incredibly tough so I made a batch of this marinade and soaked them over night. Throwing them on the grill gave them a much better taste than pan frying the marinated pieces but both were a lot better with the marinade than without it.
You do not need to add anything to this marinade; just following the mixing instructions on the back and make sure you stir it well so you don't have lumps. If you want to give it a bolder taste you can add some Worchester sauce to it but I like to add some pineapple juice or about three tablespoons of freshly squeezed orange juice. The chicken was the best of the three and I chalk some of that up to the breasts being boneless as well as thinly sliced and pounded out with a meat tenderizer. They only took about five minutes to cook completely on the grill and they were so soft that you didn't need a knife to cut them. There are specialty marinades for chicken but after preparing the boneless breasts this way, I am sticking with this marinade when making chicken this way.
The pork chops were going to require a little extra work. They were bone-in instead of pork steaks so I had to marinade them a little longer and poke them several times with a fork. Even so, the result was better than I expected. This is part of Kikkoman's "Quick & Easy Marinade series so you don't have to let your meat products soak in it for hours and hours but the longer you let it soak the better the flavor you will get from it. This is a little high in sodium but most of that stays with the liquid so when you cook it you can expect a lot of that to stay in the marinade bowl or burn off when cooking. Salt, soy sauce, yeast and wheat gluten are the main ingredients that help to tenderize meat a little bit and the onion, garlic, soybean oil and paprika are what help with taste. I rarely eat spicy food so if you are worried that this is going to be "too much" or too spicy, it isn't. Tasting it as a marinade it will seem strong but as I said, most of that is going to stay in the liquid as well as burn off when cooking. You will get a great taste from it but it isn't something that I would ever say is too strong or overpowering.
When I was prepping some lamb cubes for a shish-kabob I used some of this marinade with my Food Saver. I wanted to see if extracting all the air from the meat would improve the flavor of the Kikkoman Marinade Mix For Meat. It did make the lamb even more tender than my usual Italian dressing and 24 hour hold time but it gave it a different taste too so don't go all crazy with this and do five pounds of meat with it until you experiment with it. My grocery store sells these for .79 cents a packet but now that I am using them more often I get them by the box [one dozen] at a restaurant supply store with a final price of .53 cents a piece. This is a great marinade for almost any type of meat but I would not use it on fish unless you are willing to experiment with one piece at a time to see how long it would need to soak and how you plan on cooking it.
This isn't going to make every piece of meat taste like it is a perfect cut but it will make things like London broil and rump roast easier to eat. How you cut it and the amount of time that you let it soak will play a big part in the end result so don't be afraid to try different methods to marinate with this!
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