The grilling season is officially open. Pulling out mangal and warming up with my favorite chicken shashlyk flavored with cumin, paprika, loads of garlic, and lemon juice. All sealed into the meat with the best grilling accessory — mayo.
There’s a little story here.
Everyone knows and makes fun of a heavily mayo-based Soviet cuisine — salads Olivier and mimosa, herring under a fur coat, jellied fish. I get it — when it came to food, we were paupers.
Mom also used mayo to marinate meat and chicken. Friday night, she would mix it with some salt, pepper, garlic, spices if there were any. On Saturday, this meat would travel with us to dacha, where skewered it was cooked over live coals outside.
Even the crappiest meat cuts mom could get her hands on would come out moist inside with a nice char, never burnt, perfectly flavored. She never took credit for that cooking success — we were hungry and outside everything tasted great.
In my new US environment, I quickly noticed that mayo was being looked down on and never volunteered mom’s uncool idea. Besides mayo, there was so much in my new life of plenty.
Until I saw my mom’s recipe in Samarkand cookbook by Caroline Eden.
The recipe was not my mom’s exact version. We never knew cumin and mom would rather cut her hands off than use precious lemons to squeeze the juice for a marinade — that would be vinegar. But the idea and everything else was from our Soviet dacha.
Backed by the book, I started whipping my kabobs batch after batch attributing my steady success like mom, to the outdoors. Until I stumbled upon a piece by Kenji Lopez-Alt in The New York Times. It was about a “secret ingredient that improves meat every time.” And that ingredient was… You guessed it — mayo.
Being a viscous emulsion — i.e. a mixture of things that don’t mix — of fat, water, and protein, mayo covers the meat evenly and stays in place. Heat completely cooks off the mayo taste that turns some people away. Water evaporates. Fat holds and intensifies flavors, and prevents drying. A thin protein layer — those eggs beaten into oil — creates a coating for a quick and easy char.
There’s more — mayo emulsion protects meat from burning when coating marinade contains sugar.
By the way, these are the reasons why mayo browns better than butter even on bread.
Mom should have taken that credit.
WHAT WENT INTO THE MARINADE
— 3 lb of boneless skinless chicken thighs, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 pieces
— 2 Tbsp mayonnaise
— juice and zest of 1 lemon
— 5 garlic cloves crushed
— 1 tsp paprika
— 1 tsp ground cumin
— 1 tsp kosher salt
— 1 tsp black pepper