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The green dye experiment, from the same site:

https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/dye.html

... supporting the logic that marination is mostly a surface treatment, and thus there's not that much point in waiting a full day to marinate something, but rather just enough time for the marinade to "penetrate" the surface layer that's as far as it's going anyways. Which is why, for instance, if you read a Kenji recipe, it's going to suggest marinating for "at least 30 minutes".

Oh cool, thanks for the full dye link. I think it may be that brining in an adequate salt solution is sufficiently different from this kind of surface marination.

Actually, I thought about this some more, and if marinating for 30 minutes is sufficient to basically maximize or saturate the surface penetration, then comparing the vacuum to no vacuum at 1 hour is pointless. Better to compare at say 5 or 10 minutes.

Yes, the marinade doesn't go very far beyond the surface; and that's why one should increase the surface by making many small pieces out of one big steak (or breast, etc.) It won't change the total marinating time but the result is going to be more interesting.

This is why kabobs are so good.

There are a couple more options.

Shopper's Corner (a boutique market in Santa Cruz) has the most amazing marinated meats I've ever tasted, and their trick is that they run them overnight in a vacuum tumbler. Presumably a regular tumbler would have the same effect.

When I lived there, one of my favorites was a teriyaki ribeye. It was obvious from color that the marination fully penetrated the meat - steaks have striations and tumbling opens them up. So you can get a lot more surface area mechanically.

There's also the option of "mechanical tenderization" - basically poking a zillion holes.

> poking a zillion holes

Yes, I have something like this

https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_S...

But I've found that making bite-sized morsels is much simpler.

Yeah, this is also explained in the book I can highly recommend: The Science of Cooking [0]. It has stuff like this and many more tricks and background. It’s absolutely pop-science, so don’t expect a dissertation, but it’s great for home cooks.

[0]:https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19723027W/The_Science_of_Coo...

J. Kenji López-Alt documents trying a bunch of different methods/liquids/lengths of time of marinating in The Food Lab book and it just doesn't do much of anything IIRC.

Why would osmosis overcorrect one way and then invert, absent some additional external force?

Great question. There's an explanation here. It sounds like this only applies to dry brining, in other words, a wet brine or salty marinade would skip the first stage.

Dry-brining cuts out the unnecessary added water by using the natural moisture content of the meat to create a concentrated brine that, when given enough time, is naturally absorbed back into the meat before cooking.

Season a steak with kosher salt, and within a few minutes, you will witness osmosis at work: Liquid from the steak will bead up on the surface of the meat, drawn out by the salt. Wait another ten minutes, and that liquid from the beef will have started to dissolve the salt, forming a concentrated brine

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine

Yeah, I've never really night that explanation even with a dry brine. With a dry brine it's still going to draw water out to equilibrium. There's no real reason it would overshoot. Mixing with the salt and becoming a wet brine will still mean it's much saltier than the inside, and so won't draw back inside.

Momentum? Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms?

"Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms" sounds like the title of an amazing 80s SciFi novel dealing with the fleeting nature of life amidst a group of chefs who let themselves not be stopped by the laws of nature in pursuit of new, better food experiences.

Jerry Pournelle would have written it while procrastinating about writing an article for BYTE Magazine.

Edit: it's not the same plot at all but this reminded me of the short story, "The Nothing Spot" (1978): http://vintage.failed-dam.org/nothing.htm

Fun story, thank you for sharing! The beginning reminded me of the concept of the Pale from Disco Elysium.

Man we made hard to use websites back in the day. Fixed breaks and tiny font on a mottled similar colour background!

I wish more browser apps had a reading mode

It even breaks Reader mode on iPhone!

I don’t think it would work like a rubber band. However, given that proteins degrade during marination, there has to be a change in osmolality of the meat. This may or may not affect how moisture and flavour is drawn in.

I have my doubts about this, and also whether it is relevant that a pressure differential can increase the rate of osmosis.

If, as the author contends, meat can be regarded as a water-saturated matrix of proteins [1], then the pressure inside the meat will rise to match the external pressure. The only way for a pressure differential to form would be if the matrix formed a very rigid shell (even a slight flexibility would allow the pressure to equalize), but it does not.

Furthermore, because water is almost incompressible, this occurs without any appreciable change in volume. The author suggests that if the matrix compresses, then that will expel water, but this will only be the case if the voids in the matrix become smaller. It's more likely, I think, that the only change would be that the walls of the voids will become thinner, as the water inside the voids can follow the pressure increase without changing appreciably in volume: in effect, the water inside the voids supports them against the pressure outside.

All of this assumes the pressure is being applied equally in all directions, which is the case if you are applying the pressure to the marinade, rather than squeezing the meat in one direction.

[1] Or a cellulose matrix in the case of vegetables.

Well, you could argue the pressure/vacuum would suck the marinate deeper into the meat, thus starting the process deeper inside the tissue causing a more deep and even marination.

Just playing devils advocate. I really don’t know how this works.

The tests show that this isn't what happens though.

The vacuum is outside the meat, though, so if anything it's bound to suck whatever is in the meat out of it.

This is pretty much exactly what the article says doesn’t work

Air pressure can have effects on chemical processes, at least when some kind of phase transition may occur between liquid and gaseous phases. I don't think that's happening here, but the vacuum could have some negligible effect on, say, drying out the meat (evaporation is faster at lower pressures)

If we want to be particularly pedantic (and apparently I do)… the process you mention - evaporation - is better classified as a physical process (inter-molecular forces) rather than a chemical process (molecular bonds).

Ah yeah, I didn't mean evaporation was a chemical process, it was something in addition to that. Aside from evaporation, there are chemical processes which (for example) generate gases, which is not a phase change but a change to form a different molecule that is gaseous at the given conditions. The cool thing is that the rate of such reactions is usually dependent on the pressure.