Marinade That Adds More Than Salt And Sugar

So, today we're reviewing another great product in the modern grocery products:  French's Flavor Infuser.

Have you seen this advertised?   I found this coupon in the paper showing a cartoon of a hand ramming this product into a roast of some sort....and it really made me wonder about the food safety issues.  This is the non-medical person's answer to using a syringe to inject marinade into meats.

This is not something new.

Being in the biomedical profession, I can tell you that it is quite common for large syringes to go missing around Thanksgiving and Christmas (but when the lab buys them by the 1000s, it's hard to miss one or two).

Anyway, the idea is that you have this syringe (or tube) that is filled with a wet marinade and you jam the needle (or pointy bit) into the meat, where you then give it an injection of flavor.

Honestly, for tough, dry meat, I can see why it came about.

However, there are drawback to this method, namely, the backwash.

There's always a little backwash that comes into the needle and syringe when you use it for an injection of say, vaccine, which is why the whole syringe is discarded, not just the needle.  The same is true of using the syringe for marinade- some of the fluid from the meat is going to backwash into the syringe...

...which is why the biomedical people who use this cooking method use a new syringe every time.

But that's not obvious to everyone...and French's certainly doesn't make it obvious in their advertising.

In fact, you have to go TO THEIR WEBSITE, look on the product page, and there, in fine print are the words:
*Single use only


When I went searching for the ingredients to this product (which they do NOT have listed on their site), I ended up on the FAQ page, where almost every question is about whether or not you should/could reuse the marinade squeezer.  I mean, it looks like it's a multi-use product:  it's fairly large and it's got a cap and everything.

I won't keep the suspense from you:  YOU SHOULD NOT EVER REUSE THIS.

In fact, with 4% of your daily sugar and 38% of your daily sodium intake and a tube that looks like a difficult-to-squeeze version of a tube of toothpaste, I would high advocate NOT using this product anyway.

And just because you asked, no I have not tried it myself.  It's not gluten-free.