Grab For Eats A nice piece of steak or ribeye can make your family dinner party more delicious and memorable. But to ensure perfectly cooked meat, the chef needs to be flawless while marinating the meat pieces. You can tenderize your steak meats in various ways rather than vinegar marinating. But does red wine vinegar tenderize meat?
Red wine vinegar can be the best solution to tenderize meats in absence of white or plain vinegar. There are multiple ways to tenderize meat which is the first and foremost step all chefs must follow. A properly marinated and tender meat can strengthen the aftertaste with a yummy aroma.
So, to make your meat tenderizing more accurate we have gathered all the possible ways to make your appetite more enhancing.
Why Do Meats Need to Be Tenderized?
To make your meats easy to cook and consume with an added tender texture, you need to tenderize them properly. If you want your meat to be less chewy with a soft and tasty biting experience, tenderizing will help a lot in this case before marinating those meat pieces.
It is often seen that, though the color of the meat is perfect from the outside, it doesn’t taste tender and succulent when you bite into it. It happens due to the lack of tenderizing. The tissues or grains of the meats are strongly connected which resists the entrance of seasoning when applied before cooking.
For this reason, the meat doesn’t get juicy and properly cooked. To eliminate such scenarios, it is a must to beat up or pound the meat. If you tenderize your meat this way, the connective tissues become soft and allow the seasoning to go inside the meat. Thus, the meat can get a perfect spicy and tender taste after cooking.
For this reason, a perfect tenderized meat can be the ultimate move of a chef to make meat pieces more delightful every time.
How Does Red Wine Vinegar Help to Tenderize Meat?
Red wine vinegar adds a hot alcoholic flavor with a juicy texture that makes your meat more tender. There are lots of ways to tenderize your steam meats. Among them, vinegar or wine can be the most efficient and easy way to tenderize your meat. But there’s a catch.
Although most of us like to use plain vinegar as a meat tenderizer, red wine vinegar can change the game. It adds high heat to the alcoholic flavor after cooking which denatures the meaty structure. Thus, you can obtain an extremely tender and flavorful piece of steak.
As soon as you pound the meat, the red wine helps to break down the joints of the flank and allows the insertion of seasoning more perfectly. So, you can get the actual taste of the seasoning and tender meat with a sour aftertaste.
How to Tenderize Red Meat?
Meats can be tenderized easily by using salt, pounding, vinegar, slow cooking, etc. Tenderizing meat is the primary step that reflects whether your steak will be amazingly tender or chewy. So, all the chefs out there must be concerned about it to avoid an improper meat cook.
But you don’t have to worry since we have summed up a list of different ways to tenderize meat quickly. These techniques can be your best move to make your guests smile at every bite of the meat:
Mallet Pounding method:
This technique has been very popular and is considered the most effective way of tenderizing meats. Repeated strikes with a hammer-like mallet produce some fine pores on the surface of the meat. It breaks down the muscle fibers and allows the seasoning to get inside.
But remember, too much pounding will damage the meaty texture and may make the surface dull. So, soft strikes on all the sides evenly will do the job perfectly.
Marinade steaks perfectly:
How can you expect juicy, succulent, and tender steak meat without marinating? This technique adds extra flavor and savory taste to your steaks. You can use vinegar as a meat tenderizer as a basic element. Besides, it can be substituted with wine, lemon juices, etc. This style of tenderizing ensures a high heat after cooking and also increases the aroma of the seasonings.
Slow and Low Cook Method:
With a slow cooking method, you can give your meat steaks a perfect cooking texture. This technique is mainly used for less thick meat cuts like chuck roast or pork shoulder. All the hard fibers and tissues become soft in the slow cook method.
Besides, this method requires the least effort because all you need to do is to boil water and slow cook the meat under low heat. But the time required in this process is more than 3 hours since slow cooking will help in even tenderizing.
Knife method:
Making thin slices of the meat with a knife helps greatly to get a tenderized cut. If you bisect the connective grains, the meat gets softer automatically which allows the loose surface to absorb more seasoning.
These are some of the meat tenderizing techniques that can be followed at home to level up your cooking experience.
Substitute for Meat Tenderizer
The best way to show your cooking skills is to use a substitute if any of the main elements of cooking is missing. For this reason, it is necessary to know some perfect substitute for meat tenderizer if vinegar or wine is not available. Some of the best alternatives for tenderizing meat are mentioned below:
- Fork Pinning
This technique is very useful when you can’t find your mallet or knife. Simply create some small pores on all sides of the meat surface to make it tender and perfectly seasoned.
- Baking Soda
Baking soda can be great work whenever you run out of vinegar. It can alkalize the meat surface all around resulting in soft and tender meat. Though baking soda helps in tenderizing the meat cuts, excessive or long time use of it may spoil the taste since it gives an alkaline fragrance.
- Rubbing salt
This method of tenderizing meat is also known as the traditional and most reliable technique of all time. Place your meat cuts on a frying pan, apply salt on all sides, give a perfect rubbing on all sides, and you are good to go. After a few hours of resting in the refrigerator, you will have the most tender and juicy seasoned meat.
Things to Be Kept in Mind
To make your steak cooking more enhancing and tip-top, there are some important facts you need to remember:
- Do not keep your marinated for too long. Otherwise, you will end up with loose and gluey meat pieces.
- Do not use too much red wine vinegar since the alcoholic flavor can reduce the seasoning flavor.
- To get perfectly tenderized meat, it is important to pound the meat. The knife should be used to cut the grains of the meat sideways rather than following the line.
Conclusion
The overall taste of your steak or ribeye depends on how perfectly you prepare it. This includes, perfect cutting, marinating, freezing, etc. So, if you are looking forward to cooking a yummy meat cut, tenderizing meat must be done precisely.
In this case, vinegar, as well as red wine vinegar, can accomplish half of the task. If you apply the perfect proportion of vinegar to tenderize meats, you can have the most delicious moment.
