So, I could read and follow a recipe for marinades – but that is soooo boring.  Instead, I like to just tinker on my own and learn through mistakes…

My wife had purchased a marinade from the grocery store for chicken and we let it marinade for 24 hours.  Now I had marinaded before, but never let it sit the full 24 hours.  Wow – what a difference.  The flavor of the marinade had truly melded with the chicken.  The meat was moist, and so very tasty.

So I was going to be making tacos and thought about creating a marinade for the steak, shrimp and pork.  I tend to not measure things.  So I added olive oil, white vinegar, 2 tomatillos, a whole head of cilantro, 2 raw garlic cloves, salt and pepper.  I created a few variations of this marinade for each of the three meats.  For the shrimp I had not used tomatillos, and did add some lemon juice.  For the pork chops, I had not used the tomatillos and added some chipotle adobo sauce and a little ponzu sauce.

I let them all sit and marinade for 27 hours.

The results:

1. super tasty steak that almost melted in your mouth and the marinade was so delicious.

2. hard shrimp – something went wrong here and I’m wondering if it was the lemon juice in the marinade or the amount of time that the shrimp marinated.  The shrimp was raw shrimp and I barely cooked it on the bbq – but it was hard.

3.  dry pork chop.  The pork chops that I used were boneless and it didn’t come out moist like the steak.

Since this first go at my custom made marinades, I did steak and chicken and they both came out great.  So, so far a 24 hour marinade seems to work well with poultry and steak.