This evening we had some jarret de boeuf that I’d subjected to an experimental marinade. It was very good, but the marinade may seem weird (I was surprised the actual marinade tasted fairly normal). The rationale about acidity and tenderising is on this website and I sort of riffed on their findings, or did I segue? At my age, should probably stick to academic English and write that I improvised, or made their marinade slightly more French…
My variation was juice of one orange and half a lemon as per above, teaspoon of low salt soy sauce, a fat clove of garlic, microplaned to puree and a good glass of blood black Cahors.
Because the research suggested that the marinade only penetrated a few mms I chopped the shin into chunks rather than leaving it as a rather splendid single 1 kg slab. Browned it prior to braising and the meat turned a rich black colour, three hours in a cast iron casserole at C160 fan and it was superb.
Don’t disagree, and or course pineapple too, but these are usually with non-European chicken or pork dishes , whereas this was a take on boeuf bourguignon, where the beef is normally tenderised by being cooked in red wine rather than by being marinaded in citric fruit juice
I often use preserved lemons or slices of (frozen) Seville oranges when cooking white meat, but I’d never before tried this with beef - the imagined taste seems counter-intuitive but it wasn’t.
The best way of dealing with garlic is to cream it with the back of a round bladed knife and some salt.
This way it turns into a cream which dissolves into your cooking and nobody gets unpleasant chunks and it is not quite as brutal as microplaning.
I would normally simply use a garlic press, but a lot depends on whether I’m after a pre-cooking or post-cooking garlic flavour (garlic added at the start of near the end). When added near the end then I’m a lot more careful to ensure everything is finely divided with no lumps coming through.
