How to Make a Basic Chicken Marinade

Tom Papoutsis: Hi, I am Tom Papoutsis. Today we are doing chicken basics and right now we are going to work on marinades. What we are going to do is we are going to do a basic marinade, something that will give you a foundation to work off of and what we are going to use as far as our ingredients are olive oil, red wine vinegar, basil, black pepper, onion powder, either garlic powder or fresh garlic and salt.

With our marinade, we are going to start out with of course, something, we got -- the marinades are liquid, so we got to use liquids. What we are going to start out with -- I am going to use some extra virgin olive oil. Be careful, we are going to actually put some in our bowl. Now depending on how much you are going to use as far as your chicken is concerned or how many pieces of chicken you have, depends on how much you are going to make.

What I like to do a lot of times, I am going to make it for you in a bowl here because we are just doing a small quantity, but what you can do is take your chicken, put it in a pan and then just pour these ingredients or put them in a bowl. Put your chicken in and pour this stuff over top and then mix it all around, put it on a pan, we will cover it up, put in the refrigerator and let it sit.

So essentially, what I am going to do, let's go ahead, we are going to put a couple of the wings in here. I have these chicken wings. I have got some olive oil in there, here is the other wing. So what I am going to do and you could put whatever or how many you want. I am going to take these and put the olive oil in. We are going to add some vinegar, not a whole a lot, but enough. The vinegar actually is going to help tenderize things.

The thing you got to remember about olive oil is if you use a lot of this, once you put in refrigerator it's going to tighten up on. So you can use olive oil, you can use actually canola oil, anything like that. Me personally, my preference is extra virgin olive oil. I am going to take and don't be worried about your quantity. So I am going to use some basil. Don't worry about your quantities. Put enough in there to give it a little bit of spice, a little bit of color. If you put in a little bit like this you put two -- I don't know maybe two teaspoons or something like that, but just put enough in there to do what's you want to do.

I always say and remember, if you have seen some of my other videos, I have said, "Use your nose, if it smells strong, it's strong. Use a little bit. You don't want to overpower it. If it doesn't smell that strong, put a little bit more in there depending on how much flavor you want." This is cracked black pepper. Cracked black pepper tends to have a little bit more flavor than ground pepper. So I am not going to use as much. It's pretty strong and when -- if you put too much in here, what's going to happen is when you bite into that chicken, you are going to bite into a piece of pepper. So I will put enough in there that it's going to give me the flavor that I want, but I am not going to go too crazy.

Now our onion powder, I am going to add a little bit of onion powder and just like I said, enough to give us. I like to just shake this in and I can -- now I am starting to smell the onion because it's all over the place, but just enough onion powder to give it's a little bit of onion flavor and of course, the garlic is the same way. If you want to use fresh garlic, you can take fresh garlic and just crack it and throw it in here.

Now at this point I am going to grab a spoon and we are just going to mix this around. Now be sure to mix it around, good coat everything and you can see how things are starting to mix together in here and we are going to cover that. Just make sure it's well coated, get some of your spices on top of your chicken and what we are going to do is we are going to let that sit.

What we are going to do now is cover this and we are going to let it sit for five, minimum of four hours. The longer, the better. We will cover it, put it in the refrigerator and next, we are going to do rubs. We are going to do actual dry rubs that we can put on our chicken and spice our chicken up that way.