Recipe: Spice-rubbed butterflied lamb with herb couscous and labneh.

Your barbecue has been getting a solid work-out over the summer but there are dozens of dinners yet to come off that grill. Now’s the time to introduce a few new marinades, pastes and rubs to trusty proteins, and step up your favourite barbecue ingredients.

The best lamb marinade

I’m a fan of the classic Italian marinade of rosemary, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and loads of crushed garlic for lamb, but recently I’ve been dumping the rosemary and the salt, and roughly blitzing the other ingredients with a few anchovies, capers and black olives instead. I rub this mix on a butterflied lamb leg for the barbecue. Given the salt in those last three additions, be careful with adding any extra.

Malaysian satay

Great satay starts not with peanut sauce, but with marinating your chosen meat. This could be the chicken or beef we’re most familiar with, or with the rabbit or lamb satay sticks sold in their millions each year at the street stalls of Kajang, the Malaysian suburb outside KL that claims it’s the original home of satay.

Chop and pound the tender, finely chopped, white hearts of lemongrass with cumin seeds, peeled galangal and a little oil, salt and sugar. Spread the resulting paste thick on all your skewers (cut the meat into small cubes to keep it authentic – a little bit of fat on the meat is OK, especially if you’re using lamb) and let the flavour infuse in the fridge for a couple of hours. Then grill the sticks over a fierce flame with the paste still on them.These are so good you don’t even need the peanut sauce – almost!

Reshmi kebab

Most of us are accustomed to that orange tandoori paste used by most Indian restaurants but this is a softer, lighter yoghurt marinade, perfect for chicken thighs. Mine is built around mixing saffron, finely grated ginger, minced or grated onion and its juice, a little oil, some lemon juice, and salt with thick Greek yoghurt. The onion seems to make the meat extra tender, which isn’t surprising when you know it’s the secret ingredient in the marinade that makes grilled or roasted Persian lamb so special.

To make a more traditional version, add ground cashews or ground almonds, substitute fresh cream for half the yoghurt, and add black pepper and chopped coriander instead of saffron.

Pork and pineapple

Pineapple has long been a favoured partner for pork – a pineapple ring on a gammon steak or even pineapple ketchup with your jerked pork. Try using pineapple or its juice in a marinade for pork chops and you’ll find that it also has amazing meat tenderising properties. I’ll brine pork neck in a marinade of 1 litre of pineapple juice flavoured with 2 tbs each of brown sugar and salt, and 1 tbs soy sauce. The enzymes that make your mouth sting when you eat fresh pineapple will work wonders tenderising the meat quickly – just don’t marinate it too long or it can become cooked in appearance, and pasty.

Quick exotic marinades

The only exception to the burny sugar marinade rule (see my essential barbecue marinade tips online at delicious.com.au) is with meat that you want to serve rare but with a dark, toasty crust, or “bark” as my southern US barbecue buddies call it. Try sticky soy-based kecap manis to add instant flavour to rump or porterhouse steaks that you’ll serve rare and sliced, or Arab pomegranate molasses when you want crusty-but-still-pink lamb chops. Just remember to shake off most of the marinade before cooking.

With fish fillets for the barbecue, try a Japanese teriyaki sauce, a Moroccan green chermoula paste loaded with fresh coriander and parsley (all the rage a decade ago), or make a sweet miso paste by combining 150ml miso with a warmed combination of 75ml of mirin, 40g of caster sugar and 50ml of rice wine vinegar. It’s great spread on salmon or even par-cooked eggplant or corn before putting on the grill.

Pitmaster’s spice rub

Dry spice rubs are a quick way to add a bang of flavour to whatever you put on the barbecue.The secret is they need some salt or sugar to help draw the flavours into the meat, and that they should be balanced, with all flavours identifiable but none dominating.

Rubs are big news in the American south. Combine garlic and onion powders with cayenne pepper, paprika, crushed cumin seeds, salt, sugar and dried oregano. Spread your spice rub on pork, beef or chicken.

For something more Mexican add some cinnamon and orange zest, or pair these two with crushed coriander and cumin seeds to take the flavours to the Middle East.

My top seven tips for perfect marinades and spice rubs

You marinate to add flavour and, sometimes, to help tenderise meat, chicken and seafood. Sugar and salt in the marinade helps pull the flavours into the chosen protein, while the acid from the likes of lemon juice, yoghurt or vinegar can help tenderise.

• Make sure you massage the marinade all over the meat, fowl or seafood. Turn it over a couple of times while it is marinating in the fridge so all the meat receives a good coating. Think of using a food-grade plastic bag to make this all much easier rather than the usual glass or ceramic bowl. Avoid leaks by double-bagging or placing the bag in a bowl when placing in the fridge.

• Most marinades need time to work their magic so plan (and act) ahead. Spice rubs and pastes are quicker as the flavour stays on during cooking, rather than dripping off.

• To speed up marinating consider using smaller chunks of meat or use a very strongly flavoured marinade.

• Beware of leaving items in the marinade too long, especially if using an already tender piece of protein, as you risk it “cooking” so it breaks down too much. Usually, you can blame the acid for this but there is a particular danger of this if you are using a powerful marinating agent like pineapple, kiwi or papaya in your marinade. Here, an enzyme called actinidain (and bromelain in the case of the pineapple) in the fruit breaks down protein even faster.

• Sweet marinades contain sugars that may quickly burn in fast, direct heat, before your meat is fully cooked. That’s why I cook my Chinese-tasting marinated chook with honey, soy and grated ginger on a slow, or indirect, heat on the barbecue – or better yet, in the oven!

• Never serve uncooked marinade. Never use your raw marinade to baste unless you’ve cook it out well for five minutes to kill any gribblies.

• Salt and sugar in marinades can suck out juiciness (albeit to replace it with their flavour) and acids can “cook” ingredients by breaking down their structure too much (see rule #4). So marinate more tender proteins (like chicken and fish) and small, thinner pieces of protein for less time than big chunks of tough red meat.