Rescues · TO MARINATE
Burnt black patches and a bitter taste.
Why it happens
Sugar in the marinade, not wiped off. Sugars carbonise well below searing temperature.
Recovering it
Surface damage from over-marinating is permanent — trim it if it is thin, otherwise cook it and accept the texture. Mushy enzymatic damage is unrecoverable. Excess sugar can be wiped and blotted before the pan, which usually prevents the worst of the burning. The reliable habit is to treat the marinade as seasoning for the surface, and to salt separately and ahead if you want the interior seasoned.
The mechanism
The claim that a marinade penetrates deeply is mostly wrong. Flavour molecules are large and diffuse slowly through dense muscle; after several hours most have travelled only a few millimetres. Salt is the exception — it is small and ionic and does move inward, which is why the genuinely effective part of most marinades is the salt, and why a dry brine achieves much of the same result. Acid does something else entirely and is the part that goes wrong: citric or acetic acid denatures surface proteins in the same way heat does, so past a few hours the outer layer turns opaque, mealy and chalky, cooked without ever meeting a pan. Ceviche is that effect used deliberately. Enzymes in pineapple, papaya and ginger are more aggressive still and turn meat to mush within hours. Oil carries fat-soluble aromatics and helps them cling; sugar helps browning but burns.
The full TO MARINATE lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.