How long to marinate meat before cooking?
How long do I need to marinate a piece of meat for flavor to penetrate all the way into it? Are there easy calculations based on the maximum thickness? Does it also depend on the kind of meat or sauce?
I marinated a pork loin for something like 18 hours. The flavor only got 30% from edge toward center. It was a little odd having the core of each slice without the same taste as the outer ring.
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In my personal experience, without resorting to something like injecting the marinade or making cuts for it to get in, it really only affects the outside of the meat for a short distance, even when left for days.
I have not attempted vacuum-assisted marination, and I'm not sure it would offer much, really, since the primary function of vacuum sealers for food is removing excess air, not really placing the food under serious vacuum. I have plunked meat in a marinade and left it probably longer than some official somewhere thinks is OK (It's in the fridge, in an acid and alcohol solution (I typically use red wine) so I'm not that nervous about it.) At least the redness of the wine (which provides a visual clue to penetration depth) never gets "to the core" of any reasonable sized hunk of meat. To the best of my recall it might be 3/8" or 9mm at most, usually somewhat less.
This does not constitute a problem in my experience because I don't peel a cooked piece of meat like an onion to eat it, so most bites have some marinated exterior and some interior, so the desired flavor is there. It did conflict with what marinating for several days "should have achieved" in my preconceived notion of it. I was wrong in my thinking, and reality was not going to cooperate. So that's the reality I found when trying it.
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