Mustard as a marinade base
Mustard is, obviously, our favorite marinade base. It’s tangy, it tenderizes meat, makes the flavor amazing, and helps hold other spices to the food’s surface, making it ideal for chicken, pork, vegetables and steak. It acts as a thick, emulsified base, with popular combinations including honey-mustard, vinegar-based, or garlic-herb blends, often requiring only a few short hours of refrigeration to do its good work.
Sweet + Savory
We found a sweet-savory approach best for many meats and for vegetables with stronger flavors like Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and some mushrooms. Generally, the tangier and bolder the mustard, the sweeter other components needed to be for balance, while milder mustards could get the balance right with only mildly sweet ingredients. Here are some sweet-savory pairings we liked for marinades:
Bornier Original Dijon Mustard + Campo D’Oro Sicilian Apricot Jam (pro-tip: make extra and this also makes a great sauce base to accompany the cooked chicken later)
Plochman’s Original Yelllow Mustard + Traeger Honey & Brown Sugar Glaze: another that doubles as a sauce to finish.
Kosciusko Spicy Brown Mustard + soy sauce + Butterfly Bakery of Vermont Garlic Scape Sauce: intensely flavorful and bold as a marinade.
Hot + Bold
Some meats and milder mushrooms like Portabellas, especially when grilled, do beautifully with heat. Here are some spicier marinades we liked:
Maille Dijon Mustard + Crystal Louisiana Worcestershire Sauce + Momokufu Chili Crunch sauce: this combination is not playing around, and it is wildly delicious, especially on flank steak and similar cuts of meat.
Stuzzi Premium Italian Hot Sauce + Bono Sicilian Organic Marmalade + Melinda’s Habanero Honey Mustard + Caravel Gourmet’s Smoked Garlic Salt w/ Dried Garlic: all four of these bold ingredients are delicious on their own, but even more delicious together as a marinade.
Mama Teav’s Hot Garlic Chili Crisp + Dansoony Hot Spicy Korean Yellow Mustard Paste + Dumpling Daughter Spicy Sweet Soy-Brown Sugar Sauce: we found this combination fairly universally good as a marinade on just about everything you’d want to marinate, but especially on shrimp and steak.
