Boil Your Marinade Before Serving It As A Sauce

There’s something important you need to know that you may not have thought about. If your marinade has had raw meat sitting in it, it’s full of raw meat germs.

That isn’t a problem if you discard the marinade, but the marinade often makes an excellent sauce to serve with the finished meal. So you have to keep food safety in mind!

We cook our chicken (or fish, or steak, or whatever) to make it more delicious and to kill whatever Salmonella or E. coli or other potentially hazardous food-borne pathogens might be partying on the raw meat. If you marinated the meat before cooking, you need to think about germs in the marinade, too.

Fortunately, there are a couple of easy ways to avoid giving your guests food poisoning:

1. Make extra marinade in the first place. Only add as much to the meat as you truly need to, and save the rest in a jar for after cooking.
2. Use the marinade as usual, but then cook it afterwards. If you bring a liquid to a boil for a moment (go for a full minute just to be safe), that kills Salmonella and any other food poisoning germs that might be an issue.

Which method you choose will depend on how your marinade tastes after cooking. (Some ingredients change their flavour after cooking, which you may enjoy or you may not.) Cook a portion to test it if you aren’t sure.

And if you’re still deciding how to flavour your food, check out these marinade ideas.