Woznation

This is a delicious delicious marinade I got from Jared’s mom Lynn. Before we started making jambalaya I think this was my favorite meal. It can be used on any cut of beef but we like to use it with flank steak because it is a cheap, tough cut of meat which magically becomes delicious after we marinade it.

There are really only 4 ingredients to the marinade as you can see above. Scroll down to the end of the post for amounts. Making the  marinade is very complicated, follow these directions explicitly. Combine the soy sauce, ketchup, brown sugar and garlic. Done with the marinade portion. We like to use a plastic bag to do the marinating because it makes it easy to redistribute over the  meat. Feel free to use the vessel of your choice to combine the ingredients. See  our bag O marinade below.

One optional ingredient to this marinade is red wine vinegar. You can include this if you only have time to let the meat marinade for an hour or two. For a short marinade time, the vinegar starts to break down the meat and allows the other flavors to infuse. For tastiest results we recommend NOT using the red wine vinegar and marinating for at least 6hrs (the longer the marinating the better). One additional tip, use low sodium soy sauce, it just makes everything more delicioiuser.

Once the marinade is made the next step is to prepare your meat. We like to cube our flank steak so we can make shish Ka bobs but feel free to cut your meat in whatever way makes sense for your cut. As an example; Jared’s mom marinades the full flank steak and then cuts small slices at an angle against the grain of the meat after grilling. For our shish Ka bobs we cut then cube flank steak as shown below.

The next step is to poke holes in each cube. This allows for more marinade to soak into the meat over time. For our cubes I like to put two fork punctures in an X pattern on each face of the cube. This takes some time but it is worth it. Additionally, if you have experience with lawn care you can think of this as aerating the meat.

Speaking of cubes, one of the most famous cubes is the Necker Cube shown below with it’s more interesting cousin the un/impossible cube. The most interesting thing about this cube is that it can be interpreted in at least two ways, I like this from a philosophical standpoint.

Back to the steak. Once you have prepared and aerated the meat put it in the marinade, make sure all the meat has been fully submerged (see below). This is very easy to do with our zip lock bag method, you can pretty much man-handle the meat to make sure everything is sufficiently covered.

As I mentioned earlier Amy and I like to let the steak marinade for at least 4-6 hours before we start grilling. Approximately once every hour I like to mix up the bag to redistribute the marinade and make sure all pieces get a healthy dose.

Once the meat has sufficiently marinaded it is time to build our shish Ka bobs or go directly to grilling if you did not go the shish Ka bob route. Anything you typically put on a Ka bob is fine, for this dinner Amy and I just used meat, green peppers, and onion petals. Amy believes these could have used some nice to cherry tomatoes to really make the colors pop.

We typically grill the meat but these can also be cooked on the stove top. However, if you use the stove top consider taking the batteries out of your smoke detector because the sugar in the marinade will burn (and smoke) when placed directly on the burner. When I say ‘burn’ it is more of the smoking that causes the problem, the meat still tastes amazing. To mitigate this try to get as much marinade off the meat as possible, the flavor is already infused in the meat. That said, we still recommend cooking the meat on the grill for optimum flank steak performance. Feel free to grill the meat to your preferred tenderness.

Now we feast

See Below for Quick Recipe:

The following makes enough marinade for ~3lbs of meat (flank steak is our meat of choice)

1 cup soy (preferably the low sodium soy)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup ketchup
2 teaspoons minced garlic (to taste)
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar (only include this if you are marinating for less than 2 hours)

Thoroughly mix all ingredients in the vessel of your choice (1 gallon plastic bag works well)

Prepare meat if necessary (Example: cut into cubes for shish Ka bobs)

Poke lots of holes in meat with fork (aerate)

Immerse in marinade for at least 4 hours (If you include the red wine vinegar marinade for no more than 2 hours)

Grill/Cook

Eat