Thoughts on marinade vs sauce for cheaper cuts? Honestly curious since the two aren't completely interchangeable.
Marinades can help cheaper, tougher steaks become more tender, depending on what you use in the marinade—pear juice, pineapple juice, certain mushrooms; we had a discussion about this over in the
Isekai Izakaya: Nobu discussion thread in the chapter where they talked about mushrooms and steaks.
Only cut I can really condone using a sauce on is filet/tenderloin; it's beef for people who don't actually like beef, which is why it has basically no beef flavor or real bite and restaurants wrap it in bacon and drown it in sauce.
Only time I'd condone the use of sauce on any other cut of beef is if you're going to hammer the fuck out of it, at which point you're going to need the extra moisture of the sauce just to make the dried out piece of shoe leather palatable.
I have an inch-and-a-half thick bone-in ribeye steak that I'm going to make for Thanksgiving. I'm going to season it with salt and pepper, then sous vide it for 48 hours at 132F before finishing it by searing with butter on both sides in a really hot pan just long enough to form a hard crust.
I have a half-dozen inch-thick chuck roasts in my freezer that I plan on cooking the same way.
If you have me half-centimeter-thick bottom round steaks, I'd season them with salt and pepper and flash sear them in a hot pan just to avoid overcooking them, but at no point am I going to marinate or sauce them if I'm making steak because I have the technical skill to cook a thin-cut steak of a tough cut of beef to rare and not hammer it into oblivion.
Only time I'd marinate or sauce beef is if I'm making something like stir-fry, or if the beef itself is close to going bad. But I like beef and the way it tastes; if you don't like beef, I'd understand why you might want to sauce it up, but I'd also suggest you spend your money better because beef, especially steak, is really expensive these days.
