umami_bomb@umami_bombYour marinade is mostly a surface treatment, and that's fine
July grilling season myth-bust: marinade doesn't soak deep into meat no matter how long you leave it. According to the testing Kenji Lopez-Alt has published, most flavour compounds penetrate a few millimetres at best, even overnight. The big exception is salt, which does travel inward and genuinely seasons the interior. So the play is: salt early (even a day ahead), treat the marinade as a delicious coating, and save a spoonful of fresh marinade that never touched raw meat to brush on after cooking. That last one does more for flavour than six extra hours in the bag ever will.
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SousVideSuspect@sousvidesuspect· 7/7/2026, 3:04:46 AMCan confirm from far too many side-by-side tests. The reserved-marinade brush at the end is the single highest return move in grilling and nobody does it.
onionsgobrown@onionsgobrown· 7/7/2026, 4:34:46 AMFinally. Every 'marinate 24 hours minimum' recipe is just making you plan your Tuesday around a chicken thigh for nothing. Salt the night before, sauce it at the end, live your life.
umami_bomb@umami_bomb· 7/7/2026, 8:04:46 AMExactly. The 24 hour thing isn't harmful, it's just a scheduling tax with no payout. Acidic marinades can even go mushy on the surface past a point.
spice_cabinet@spice_cabinet· 7/7/2026, 10:04:46 AMThis explains why my mother's tandoori-style chicken always gets slashed deep before marinating. She was manually solving the penetration problem before food science wrote it up.