The Brilliant Way Guy Fieri Reuses Leftover Chicken Marinade

A marinade is a fantastic way to infuse serious flavor into just about any kind of meat, and the right kind of marinade can completely level up your dish, as culinary personality Guy Fieri knows well. He's no stranger to making a bold marinade, but when he's done with the carefully crafted blend of flavors he uses on his chicken, he doesn't just toss it all down the drain like you might expect. Instead, he finds a way to safely repurpose it and get all that extra flavor into his dish by cooking the remaining marinade into a sauce. Fieri demonstrated this trick in an episode of his show "Guy's Big Bite," where he took the leftover marinade from his citrus chicken and incorporated it into the glaze that he eventually put atop the meat.

Nervous about the bacteria from the raw chicken lingering in that flavorful marinade? Don't be — reusing a meat marinade is only dangerous if you fail to heat it back up to a safe temperature. About 165 degrees Fahrenheit is typically the temperature needed to kill most types of bacteria that may hang around in the marinade, so make sure your mixture reaches that number. Since that's also typically the temperature you want the inside of your chicken to reach, it's relatively easy to remember. Just avoid using leftover marinade in any sauce that won't be heated, such as a vinaigrette for salad.

In addition to ensuring your sauce or glaze hits that 165-degree-Fahrenheit mark, make sure you don't let it cool down too much afterwards — it should be kept at or above 140 degrees Fahrenheit when serving in order to keep it safe for eating. For best results, there are a few other things to consider beyond the temperature you need for your sauce or glaze. The secret to a perfect chicken marinade is acid since it helps tenderize the chicken, so adding leftover chicken marinade to your sauce should bring a decent burst of acidity.

Depending on the amount of acid you incorporate into your sauce, however, you may want to be mindful of its flavor balance. For example, the marinade Guy Fieri mixed into his glaze added flavors that weren't yet in the sauce, lending something extra to the mixture. If your marinade includes a hefty dose of soy sauce, let's say, you may want to skimp on adding salt to the glaze or sauce to compensate. Ultimately, it depends on the exact kind of marinade you use (we've got a simple chicken marinade recipe if you need a starting point), but you'll always want to balance your flavors as if you were making a sauce from scratch. The marinade should be just another flavor-building ingredient.