Marinating: acid, salt and time

How to tell it is going right

• Contact is total: every surface is wetted, and the pieces are not welded into a clump with dry faces where they pressed together.
• The stated time was kept and kept cold, read against a clock, because this is the one technique where longer is a different result rather than a safer one.
• It worked at the surface and no further: cut a piece and the marinade’s colour stops a few millimetres in. A protein gone opaque and chalky to the centre before any heat reached it has been cooked by the acid.
• The texture is still springy and whole, not mushy, mealy, or fraying at the surface when it is lifted.
• Where the next step browns it, the surface was patted dry first: a wet surface cannot brown, and the marinade’s sugars will scorch before the food colours.

Where it goes wrong It was left well beyond the stated time on the assumption that more is better, so acid and salt worked through the thin edges: those cook to cotton and read grainy while the thick centre tastes of nothing at all.