Ten marinades made with olive oil, avocado oil or no oil at all. Marinating before you grill also cuts the carcinogens that form on charred meat.
From Cooking with Chris (@coookwithchris). Where the thread leaves out an amount of meat or a time, I filled it in and said so under that recipe. The nutrition numbers and the notes at the bottom are mine.
Per 4 oz cooked serving of the default meat, plus its share of the marinade. ~ numbers are estimates: most of a thin marinade stays in the bag (see how it's counted). The marinades are sweet, so glaze them late.
Whisk everything together and coat about 2 lb of chicken. Marinate 2–8 hours, then grill or bake at 425 °F until done.
The thread gives no amount of meat, marinating time or cooking method. The 2 lb, the timing and the oven temperature are mine.
full nutrition ↓Blend until smooth, then marinate. Grill. It makes the chicken for burrito bowls.
The amount of meat and the marinating time are mine. USDA has no chipotles in adobo, so canned chili peppers stand in for them. The real thing is saltier, so the sodium here is an underestimate.
full nutrition ↓Pulse lightly in a blender or chop everything fine by hand. Enough for about 2 lb of shrimp. Marinate 30 minutes, then grill on skewers or in a grill basket.
full nutrition ↓Best on a whole chicken or skin-on pieces. Put three-quarters of the marinade under the skin and the rest on top. Bake at 425 °F until cooked through (165 °F in the thigh).
The marinating time is mine.
full nutrition ↓Stir the marinade together. Pat the salmon dry and salt it well, then spread the marinade over it. Cover with unbleached parchment, not foil (see why), and bake at 375 °F for 10–20 minutes depending on thickness. Broil for the last 2–3 minutes if you want crisp edges, but don't burn the garlic. Pull at 125–130 °F inside and serve with parsley and lemon.
The 1½ lb of salmon and 1 tsp of salt are mine. 125–130 °F is a chef's medium. The FDA guideline is 145 °F, and using wild or previously frozen salmon covers the parasite concern at the lower temperature.
full nutrition ↓Marinate, then grill. Simmer the leftover marinade in a small pan until it thickens, and brush it on as a glaze near the end of cooking.
The amount of meat and the marinating time are mine. Rice vinegar is counted as plain vinegar. Boil the used marinade for a full minute before you glaze with it, because it has been sitting with raw meat.
full nutrition ↓Marinate for up to an hour, then grill or broil until done the way you like it.
The 1½ lb of salmon and the salt and pepper amounts are mine. Yellow mustard stands in for dijon.
full nutrition ↓Blend until smooth. This covers 2–3 lb of chicken, ideally thighs. Grill. Use it in tacos or burrito bowls, or eat it on its own.
The marinating time is mine.
full nutrition ↓Use half the marinade on the meat. Stir-fry it, then pour in the other half at the very end and cook until it thickens.
The amounts of meat, garlic and ginger are mine. The numbers use soy sauce, so with coconut aminos the sodium will be lower.
full nutrition ↓Marinate 2 lb of skirt steak for 3–4 hours, then grill hot to the doneness you like. Slice against the grain.
full nutrition ↓This is calculated from the same USDA data as Build a Day. A serving is the cooked meat plus its share of the marinade. That share depends on how much ends up on the plate. Thick pastes and glazes get eaten. A thin, oily marinade mostly gets poured out with the bag. The estimate setting uses my guess for each recipe, and all of it shows the upper limit.
% of the daily target for men (the same targets as Build a Day). ~ = mostly estimated. Carbohydrate is what's left of the calories after protein and fat, so in a marinade it is almost all sugar. Meat yields assume raw boneless meat loses about a quarter of its weight in cooking.
Two claims from the thread, plus one benefit it didn't mention.
| Point | What the evidence shows | Holds? |
|---|---|---|
| Marinating before grilling (not in the thread) | It cut the main grilled-chicken carcinogen by 92–99%. Sugar raises a different one if the meat cooks long and hot. More ↓ | Yes |
| "Avoid cooking with foil, especially with something acidic" | Lemon and salt increase how much aluminum leaches from foil into fish and chicken. More ↓ | Yes |
| "Clean ingredients" | There are no seed oils, which is good. But most US avocado oil tested rancid or cut with soybean oil, and chicken fat brings more omega-6 than any of the oils. More ↓ | Mostly |
Grilling muscle meat at high heat produces heterocyclic amines (HCAs). These cause cancer in animals, and the long-term human effect is probably modest but not zero. The most abundant one in grilled chicken is PhIP. Lawrence Livermore researchers grilled chicken breasts with and without a marinade very close to Chris's honey mustard: brown sugar, olive oil, cider vinegar, garlic, mustard, lemon juice and salt.[1] Marinating cut PhIP by 92–99%. Total HCAs after 30 minutes on the grill fell from 158 to 10 ng/g.
The catch is sugar. Another HCA, MeIQx, rose more than tenfold in the marinated chicken at 30–40 minutes of grilling. When they tested one ingredient at a time, sugar caused it. At 40 minutes the marinated chicken was more mutagenic than the plain chicken. A Kansas State study of beef steaks found the same benefit without that downside: three spice-and-herb marinades with no sugar cut total HCAs by 57–88%, and even the plain oil-vinegar base helped.[2]
In practice: marinate everything. For the four sweet marinades (honey mustard, sticky garlic, maple dijon, stir fry), cook over moderate heat and add the glaze in the last few minutes. The sticky garlic recipe already does this. Don't take any of them to char. (Moderate: consistent lab measurements across two groups, but no human outcome data)
↑ back to summaryA University of Milan group baked beef, chicken and fish three ways: in a Pyrex dish, wrapped in foil, and wrapped in foil with oil, salt and lemon.[3] Foil raised aluminum in every food. The highest levels, about 40 mg/kg, came from the seasoned fish and chicken. Electron microscopy showed larger and more numerous holes eaten into the foil where it touched seasoned food. Acids and salt bind aluminum and pull it out of the foil.
For scale: a 6 oz piece of fish at 42 mg/kg carries about 7 mg. That's around a tenth of the weekly tolerable intake for a 155 lb adult (EFSA: 1 mg per kg of body weight per week). An earlier Turkish study of meats baked in foil, without acid, found aluminum rose 76–378% but judged there was "no evident risk" from that alone.[4] One foil-baked salmon isn't a problem. Doing it every week adds to aluminum you already get from other sources, and parchment avoids the issue at no cost. (Moderate: direct measurements, small samples)
↑ back to summaryEvery recipe here uses olive oil or avocado oil, and four use none. The marinades add little linoleic acid. The serving's share of oil is a teaspoon or two, and both oils are only about 10–12% linoleic acid. The meat matters far more. In the panel above, a 4 oz serving of the Peruvian chicken (skin-on) carries 3.7 g of linoleic acid, about 9.5% of its calories, because conventional chicken fat comes from corn and soy feed. Chicken thigh is about 7%. Breast is 3%. Skirt steak, flank, salmon and shrimp are 1–2%. On the Linoleic Acid paper's terms, the beef, salmon and shrimp recipes are the low-omega-6 picks. For the chicken recipes, use breast, or pastured birds if you can find them.
The weak point is avocado oil itself. UC Davis tested 22 retail avocado oils.[5] Fifteen had oxidized before their expiration date and six had been mixed with other oils. Three bottles labeled "pure" or "extra virgin" were nearly 100% soybean oil, which is exactly what this list avoids.
For the Mexican chicken and the carne asada, which each use ½ cup, buy a brand that publishes third-party purity tests. Or use extra virgin olive oil, which works in both recipes. (Moderate: one retail survey, 22 samples)
↑ back to summary