How To Marinade

Hi, my name is Rob Cotton. Welcome to Leith's School of Food and Wine. We're a leading cookery schoold based in Central London in Chissick.

Not only do we run a year long diploma course for professional students and chefs. We also run a range of one day, one week, and evening class courses to give inspiration for further recipes and skills at home. The reason that we marinate is to give meats more flavor.

It also helps to tenderize them as well. What I've got here, two sirloins steaks and we're going to add some onions, a little bit of soy sauce, some sesame oil, and some sherry. All of these combined together will help to soften down the meat and given time will help to add flavor.

I recommend marinating a piece of steak like this for no less than half an hour to an hour. Ideally done overnight will allow the flavors to penetrate into the meat. To do this, add your onion which is finely sliced up to give off as much flavor as possible.

The sesame oil. The sherry and the soy sauce. The soy gives a really good color to the meat.

Mix that together really well and after a short while do remember to turn the meat over in the liquid so that the marinade can go all over the beef. When the beef is in the marinade, it needs to be turned over every so often to get the flavor all over the meat. Once it's marinated, it needs to be left in the fridge to avoid it spoiling.

I've just removed the beef from the fridge. Before frying, you need to remove it from any of the marinade and dry it really really well. You can see the color difference now, it's quite marked.

It's a lot darker from the soy sauce and the other flavors in the marinade will have entered into the meat, and that's how you marinade steak before frying. .