Ina Garten Swears By Adding One Ingredient To Steak Marinade

Celebrity chef Ina Garten's new memoir, "Be Ready When Luck Happens," has everyone chatting around the proverbial water cooler about everything from the bombshell revelation about her one-time separation from husband Jeffrey to her first job in the food industry. But, it also has us nostalgic for her iconic cookbooks. Perusing the pages of her 2012 offering, "Barefoot Contessa Foolproof," you'll find the most Ina Garten of Ina Garten steak recipes.

The recipe for mustard-marinated flank steak shows off Garten's quintessential aptitude for taking ordinary, inexpensive ingredients like flank steak and turning them into remarkable dishes that you'd be proud to serve. For this recipe, a Dijon mustard–based marinade does the heavy lifting. You mix the Dijon with some dry white wine to make up the acid components of the marinade. That breaks down and tenderizes the protein to make way for shallot, garlic, and tarragon, leaving this traditionally tough cut of meat tender and juicy.

All marinades need an acid or fruit enzyme to help denature or break down the meat proteins. When we make prepared mustards, we add vinegar to the mix, which turns that mustard into an acid. But, that's not the only reason mustard is so fantastic for marinades. Yellow mustard bran contains mucilage, which is just as good of an emulsifier as commercial emulsifiers like xanthan gum. That's important because, as we know, oil and water don't mix. Since marinades also contain oil to contribute to texture, balance, and flavor, an emulsifier like mustard helps create a cohesive marinade.

Moreover, mustard just tastes good. It's clearly a favorite of the Barefoot Contessa's, appearing in a multitude of marinades, sauces, and dips on her shows and in her cookbooks. She's about her favorites, Grey Poupon Dijon and Maille's whole-grain Dijon. In addition to using it as part of the marinade in her flank steak, she also uses it in several other meat, poultry, and fish recipes. That makes sense — the tang of prepared mustard can cut through fatty, umami flavors. When you use mustard as part of the marinade on flank steak, it melts into the meat, mixing with the fat, spices, and aromatics to bring out flavor and create a beautiful sear for a dinner party-worthy flank steak.