Chicago Steakhouse? I'll Pass

When A1 claimed to have a marinade for "authentic" Chicago steakhouse flavor, how could I say no? I have been using the same vinaigrette-with-garlic marinade for the last 2 years I've been cooking chicken (2005-6, 2007-8) and while I've been trying new marinades on and off (including a few failed BBQ sauces), this was the first time I'd tried marinating chicken in a proclaimed steak marinade. Not steak sauce, mind you, but actual marinade.

Well, all I can say is A1 Chicago Steakhouse marinade is AWFUL! If you like this, my apologies for my blunt disgust, but to me, ... well, several things!

1. No marinade -- be it for steak, chicken, shish-kabob, anything! -- should taste like cheap pizza sauce. With each bite I took tonight, I was reminded of a disgusting flavor from my childhood -- of pizza-flavored Goldfish crackers by Pepperidge Farm and of pizza-flavored Doritos. The industry's got a disgusting idea for what constitutes "the taste of pizza crammed into powder", and it managed to make its way into a steak sauce, for God's sake. No, my mistake: a steak marinade!
   
2. This is no marinade. I have taken pictures of the leftover marinade both so you could appreciate its repulsively bright tomato red color and just how much it looks like sauce rather than marinade. To its credit, the taste did pervade through the chicken, but no one eating my chicken would have denied that the taste was 90% on the outside and only 10% throughout. Not only that, but most marinades call for a 1-hour minimum, including this bottle -- yet I let it soak for 23 hours (put it in around 7pm yesterday, put it in the oven to start its 90-minute bake at around 5:45pm today).
   
3. I think I've already covered this base with the pizza sauce gripe, but just to throw it out there, I have NEVER tasted a steak like this before. No, I grew up mostly in central Indiana, not Chicago, but I sure as !@#$ don't think that Chicagoans eat steaks that taste like this either.

The marinade was so disgusting, it made me think of two things shortly afterwards. One was that if I were Gordon Ramsey I'd be cursing and calling this "a dog's dinner" right now; but the second was actually pretty useful! I remembered that I had had the best tasting shish-kabobs EVER/IN A LONG TIME at Dr. Walker's barbecue from a few weeks back, and I had asked his wife what her recipe was and she told me. So I'll share it here with you guys, and try my best to remember to do this next I marinade chicken: (1) pineapple juice, (2) soy sauce, and (3) garlic. That simple. It was unbelievably tasty; I (literally) couldn't believe her when she told me that that was the marinade she'd created to get this sort of flavor.

One last thing: I know some of my readers love chicken, but it's one of my least favorite meats, and so I feel compelled to assuage fears that I'm wasting time and sauce on chicken that should be spent on steak. Long story short, #1 reason I don't cook steak is my fear of stinging insects combined with the fact that wasps (2 different species) and large mosquitos fly around my patio from when I wake up until around 9:30pm EDT; #2 reason is that even if they were gone my current landlord has expressly forbidden the use of gas-based and charcoal-based grills on the wooden patios (and I would have to leave it out there; I have nowhere to keep a sooty grill inside); and the distant #3 reason is that it costs you $16 these days, as I disgustedly observed a week or two ago, to purchase a rather meager and unappetizing-looking T-bone steak. It was $20 for the New York Strip (12 oz) and God knows what it would have been if Kroger or Wal-Mart or wherever I saw this had had any superior cuts. In Indiana (or at least in Lafayette) you're better off going to a steakhouse and getting mediocre meat that's been bathing in tenderizer for the last 3 weeks than you are trying to buy a steak yourself and marinade it and grill it.

P.S. Proof-reading this I noticed I typed "marinade" a lot when I meant "marinate." I say the words properly (i.e. differently), but I guess in my brain I actually do think "m-a-r-i-n-a-d-e" is the word and that depending what part of speech it's in (noun or verb) the speaker knows to pronounce it differently. Like a "read/read" kind of thing. Or something. Odd! lol