Marinating Meats Using Wines or Spirits

If you’re marinating anything with alcohol, cook the alcohol off first. Alcohol doesn’t tenderize; cooking tenderizes. Alcohol in a marinade in effect cooks the exterior of the meat, preventing the meat from fully absorbing the flavors in the marinade.

Raw alcohol itself doesn’t do anything good to meat. So put your wine or spirits in a pan, add your aromatics, cook off the alcohol, let it cool, and then pour it over your meat. This way you have the richness of the fruit of the wine or Cognac or whatever you’re using, but you don’t have that chemical reaction of “burning” the meat with alcohol or its harsh raw flavor.