The Sticky-Sweet Pantry Staple You Should Be Marinating Steaks With

Every marinade needs a proper balance for success. Once you've mastered the simple ratio for easy marinades, adjustments can make them more spicy, savory, or citrusy, of course, but harmonizing what can seem like disparate ingredients is the key to achieving perfection. Oils add moisture-promoting fat, acids tenderize your protein, and salt, pepper, and alliums bring in basic flavors. From there, the contents of your spice cabinet make every marinade endlessly customizable. Assorted sweeteners can also move along the color-infusing Maillard reaction once your meat hits the heat, creating some nice caramelization or even just rounding out some of those harsher elements. Maple syrup, for example, is a subtly unique sticky-sweet ingredient to add to your next steak marinade.

You can swap maple syrup into literally any marinade that calls for a sweetener like sugar or honey. Blink and you'll miss it, but maple syrup will bring its own signature notes into the background of a dish. It's lightly autumnal and obviously a bit woodsy, given its forested origins. It's also a popular animal protein companion, given its long-standing association with bacon.

The most apparent and equally marvelous use for a maple syrup marinade is in a steak and egg preparation for those nicer-than-normal brunches at home. Keep it simple to really let the maple syrup sing. Little more than olive oil, balsamic, salt, pepper and a bit of garlic should be a basic enough canvas for a generous share of the sweet stuff. Save the filet mignon and chateaubriand for a lighter treatment. A maple marinade is best for those more affordable, but still flavorful, cuts of steak.

You may or may not want to put those morning vibes on the back burner closer to dinnertime, which is also a prime opportunity for a maple-marinated steak. You can certainly simply reduce the maple syrup's volume, or bring in additional components to hit that perfect marinade balance. More garlic is always a good start, and spices like cayenne pepper bring a bold edge to this versatile condiment. Score the steak's surface and let it all chill in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight for maximum saturation.