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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

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Just a guess, perhaps you could use lemon zest if citric acid from lemon juice curdles the yoghurt? – mfg Feb 8 '11 at 16:38

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

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.

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I'm afraid I don't have an answer to the salt question. The suggestion may just be because it can be difficult to judge how much salt to use in a marinade.

Yogurt won't curdle, so no worries there.

Other considerations are of course the same as with all marinades: refrigerate during the marinating processes, and don't serve the marinade as a sauce unless you've cooked it first to kill raw-meat microbes.

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Just to be clear- Yogurt will curdle but it takes heat. – Sobachatina Feb 14 '11 at 14:39
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You might want to make up your own yoghurt to use.. I am thinking the commercial ones have chemicals to stop it from fermenting too much. Maybe home made could go that little step beyond to allow the yoghurt to 'bite' into the meat.. Just my thought..

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Commercial yogurt should work fine, though I suppose you should probably avoid heavily-processed yogurt products (if nothing else, they're expensive and probably won't do anything good for the flavor). The goal here isn't really to ferment the meat - the yogurt is already fermented, and thus contains the acids and enzymes you're after. – Shog9♦ Feb 14 '11 at 16:12
Yes agreed.. You don't have to ferment the meat, but it should have enough enzymes to tenderize the meat.. But yes, try to avoid processed yoghurt.. – notthetup Feb 14 '11 at 19:23

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