The Hot Sauces You Should Reach For When Marinating Steak

Hot sauce is probably not your first choice for marinating meat, but you might want to rethink that. Steak marinades can come in many forms — vinegar, citrus-based, soy sauce, buttermilk — and maybe the most powerful option in that arsenal is vinegar. Made up of acetic acid, which is more potent than other acids like citric, vinegar tenderizes meat by breaking down proteins and changing their shape, helping them better retain water. Not every hot sauce is vinegar-based, but many of them are, and any variety of hot sauce will contain salt, which also aids in marinating by seasoning and tenderizing your steak. This just leaves the question: Which hot sauces should you use? To get the answer, Tasting Table reached out to expert Noah Chaimberg, the founder & CEO of Heatonist.

Chaimberg had one big concern when marinating steaks like skirt and flank. "You want a bold hot sauce to stand up to their meaty flavor," he told us. Plenty of popular hot sauce brands work well as basic sources of heat, or even deliver a nice chile flavor, but their simplicity means they won't cut it as a marinade. Instead, Chaimberg recommends a hot sauce like Heatonist No. 9, explaining that it "adds big flavor with tamari, kombu, and umeboshi." As the additional ingredients like lemon juice, plum, and wasabi in the hot sauce show, you want something that delivers flavors beyond just chiles and vinegar when creating a marinade.

Noah Chaimberg has another hot sauce recommendation with a layered complexity. "The caramelized onion and Worcestershire sauce in Neil's Real Deal Smoked Onion is another great complementary combination," he said. The notes in this hot sauce are all from elements that would go with steak by themselves, from caramelized onions to the sweet, smoky mix of molasses and tamarind. Look to unusual hot sauce brands to find the depth of flavor that will make it work as a marinade. Your bottle of Cholula may be great for dashing on eggs or a burger, but as the base for a steak marinade you want garlic, or mushrooms, fruit, coffee, and whatever else will elevate the final dish.

You may also want to cut your hot sauce with other ingredients because, while vinegar is a great tenderizer, it's sometimes too powerful and can push meat past tender to mushy. Hot sauces that are cut with lots of additional ingredients beyond the vinegar can help with this, and you can also bring in elements like citrus juice, honey, olive oil, or even beer and wine. The best hot sauces will bring enough flavor to stand up to some of the additions common in steak marinades, while also working on their own if necessary. Find one you love and you may never need to mix your own marinade recipe for steak again.