I'm cooking for 30, Lamb Chops are on the menu and I want to do them in a Yogurt Marinade. I've done Yogurt Marinades with mixed results and I wonder if there are some best practices?
specifically:
- How long should I marinade? With vinegar based marinades you don't want to marinate for longer than 2 hours. Is this also true with Yoghurt Marinades? If not, what is the idea amount of time to Marinate.
- I heard somewhere that you shouldn't add salt when Marinading with Yohurt until after the meat is Marinated. Is this true and if so why?
- lemon is an important flavour to this kind of dish. Can I add lemon to the yoghurt, or will that make it curdle or do something else negative to the dish?
- Is there anything else important to consider when using Yogurt as a Marinade?
If additionally you could break it down in terms of chemical processes, that would be sweet. I'm a bit of a food science nerd.
thank you very much
Best Answer
To answer part 1. I recently watched the Chicken Tikka Masala episode from Blumethals "Further Adventures in Search of Perfection". The recipe calls for marinading the chicken for quite a long time. A transcribed recipe says 10 hours: http://www.dominicsayers.com/documents/ChickenTikkaMasala.pdf.
They also go on to compare the results of a yogurt marinade and a yogurt-less marinade on chicken under an MRI scanner. I don't know if this is valid, but the yogurt apparently had an effect.