A steak marinade made using just five ingredients, including a homebrewed Pyment (grape wine mead).
Originally Posted: August 21, 2020
Table of Contents
Quick Specs
- Brew Used: Cabernet Sauvignon Pyment
- Time:
- 1 – 6 hours marinating (I’ve even gone up to 12 hours)
- 1 hour sous vide
- 4 minutes searing
Intro
When I was growing up, my mom would often throw together steak marinades without following a set recipe. My two favorite variations on this were a teriyaki marinade and a red wine marinade, with the red wine marinade being slightly higher on my list.
It was around the time that I brewed this mead that I started thinking about ways to cook with my brews, and steak marinade just seemed like the logical choice for a red wine-based mead. I had first started thinking of ways to cook with mead when I brewed my Mango-Habanero Mead with a friend. I did most of the work on these two meads over the course of a month or two, so the idea of cooking with mead was still fresh in my mind.
Ingredients
- Meat cut:
- Steak of your choice (I’ve done top sirloin, flank, and London Broil cuts)
- For the marinade:
- 2 cups Pyment red wine mead (you can use store-bought red wine, but it’s not quite as satisfying as cooking with something you brewed yourself 😀 )
- 1 cup Balsamic vinegar
- 2 heaping scoops Miso paste (liquefied with hot water)
- 5 – 10 garlic cloves. I used some homemade lacto-fermented (pickled) garlic.
- 1 long sprig Rosemary (or 2 shorter sprigs, ~5” each)
- Add whenever you feel like it:
- Salt & pepper to taste
Equipment
- Sous vide circulator (optional, but my favorite way to cook meat)
- Vacuum sealer if using sous vide
- Cast iron pan for searing
- Alternatively, you could use a grill to finish the steaks after sous vide, or to cook the steaks outright. The marinade should keep them nice and moist.
Instructions
- Coat steak generously with sea salt and freshly ground pepper, then place steak in a Ziploc bag or some sort of basin like a baking dish.
- Mix all the ingredients for the marinade together, then pour over the steak.
- Marinate for 1 – 6 hours. Due to the acidity in this marinade, it should make quick work of tough cuts of meat, but I encourage you to play with marinating times. I’ve left this one in the fridge overnight as well, which probably gave it 12 hours.
- Remove steak from marinade and pat dry.
- Optional for Steak Sauce: Pour all the marinade (minus the rosemary) into a pot and reduce over high heat. Add corn starch or roux to thicken if you wish to speed this process up.
- Note: Keep tasting the sauce during reduction. I sometimes feel like adding more balsamic vinegar or miso paste at this point for extra flavor.
- Note: When thickening a used marinade into a gravy or a sauce, you want to be sure to cook it all the way through in order to kill any bacteria left over from the raw meat. In this case, the sauce should be at a boil (in the beginning) and then a simmer, which should do the trick.
- From here you can cook your steaks via sous vide like I do (I use this time to reduce the steak sauce) or you can just cook it to your desired doneness on the grill or in a skillet. If cooking with sous vide, you can use the long cook time to reduce the steak sauce. I like to cook my steaks at 125°F for 1 – 1.5 hours and then finish-sear them on a hot cast iron, though finishing them on a hot grill is also an option.
Variations
I think the reduced wine sauce from this recipe would be good over duck breast or lamb shanks, but I haven’t tested this out yet. I also ladled some of the sauce over the Yukon Gold smashed potatoes I chose to cook as a side dish.
Tips & Tricks
When it comes to making mead reduction sauces like the steak sauce in this recipe, it’s worth making more than you think you’ll use on dinner night. Keeping the extra sauce in the refrigerator allows you to try it out with other foods.
