Meat in the Kitchen : The best cook's major goal
When it comes to preparing meat, a cook's major goal is tenderness, juiciness and flavor. To consistently turn out the best meat, it helps to have a basic insight of what happens to meat when you heat it. Cooking experience over your stove also helps. From earlier discussion you know a little about muscle tissues, connective tissues and fat. These three determine potential tenderness as well as flavor. The amount and kind of connective tissue surrounding the meat is the most difficult to deal with in the kitchen, and it affects tenderness the most. Some meat, like flank steak, has a lot of connective tissue reinforcement, so it is almost as tough as tires. Most of it is collagen, which fortunately converts to soft gelatin through slow cooking. Elastin and reticulin, the other connective tissues are less common, fortunately for us, because these remain tough no matter how long you cook them. TASTINGS Tenderness to a professional palate Professional food tasters use three criteria to assess meat tenderness: a) the ease with which their teeth sink into the meat, b) the ease with which their teeth break up the meat into fragments, c) the residue left in their mouth after chewing. The water-holding capacity of meat has an impact on tenderness, too. The more water it retains in cooking, the juicier the meat is on your plate. Some meats have better water retention qualities than others, and some cooking methods promote water retention more than others. Juiciness is actually a combination of the amount of fat and moisture, up to a certain point. Chewing on a fatty meat with little moisture, for example, doesn't give the same pleasant sensation that chewing juicy meat does. What brining of the meat, that I discussed above, does is to increase its moisture content. Tenderness and juiciness are somewhat related. A tender meat is usually also juicy, but a juicy meat may not be tender. No matter how juicy a piece of brisket is, if it is full of tough connective tissues, it won't be very tender. Unless you're willing to eat your meat raw and cold, you're going to lose some moisture in the preparation in almost any cooking method. As soon as you apply heat, moisture begins to evaporate from the surface. The muscle fibers respond and slowly contract releasing even more moisture. When you are broiling and grilling, you lose the least moisture because the cooking process is so rapid, but the lost juices are gone for good. While you lose much more moisture in roasting, some of those juices, along with their flavor and nutrients, become part of the gravy or sauce. One of your goals, no matter what your cooking technique is, to preserve as much of the original part of the meat as possible.
Choosing the right cooking method Here are three important things to remember in meat cooking: 1. Most of the tough connective tissue slowly converts into soft gelatin with heat. But as the meat temperature first begins to rise, connective tissue shrinks and becomes even tougher. It shrinks a great deal between 140 ° and 167°F (60° and 75°C). It only begins to convert into soft gelatin near the boiling temperature of water, at or above 200 °F (94°C). Any tough meat has to come up to this temperature before it becomes tender. 2. When you heat meat, the meat fibers toughen. The softest, most tender meat is raw meat. The higher the meat temperature you reach, the tougher the meat fibers are. If you want to know more on the microscopic scale, here is what happens. The tightly coiled peptide chains (the main protein components of meat tissues), start unfolding on heating. Eventually, these unfolded chains join to each other to form larger and larger aggregates. They finally reach such a large size that they can no longer remain in solution and precipitate. This process, called coagulation, occurs somewhere between 135 ° and 167°F (57° and 75°C). The more coagulation, the tougher the fibers become. You can actually see this happening—the meat turns from translucent to opaque. 3. The browning (or Maillard) reaction adds significantly to the flavor of meat (see discussion below). To get the maximum tenderness from meat, we have to make serious compromises on the differing cooking needs of the connective tissue and meat fibers. If we raise the temperature of the meat too high, we end up with fully softened connective tissues and fully toughened meat fibers. At too low a temperature, just the opposite happens: tough connective tissues and tender fibers. Meat research scientists have found that the best compromise for handling these two opposites is to cook the meat to an internal temperature between 140 ° and 147°F (60° and 64°C). If you're cooking meat that’s tender to start with, a tenderloin, for example, your major concern is to keep the fibers from toughening, which means you can remove it from the heat at a lower internal temperature. You need not worry about the small amount of connective tissue—tender cuts have very little. What grade the inspector assigned to your piece of meat also has consequences on the final flavor and tenderness. The correct final internal temperature is particularly critical with lower grade meats. Research has shown that Choice grade beef keeps its flavor intensity even if overcooked, though overcooking toughens it. The lower Select grade beef loses its flavor under the same conditions and turns even tougher than Choice grade. But remember this crucial point: The final internal temperature has more effect on tenderness than either the age of the meat or its marbling. That's why a good meat thermometer is so important. A good cook is never without a good thermometer. So how do restaurant chefs and line cooks in a steak house know when the meat is done? Do they poke a thermometer into each piece of meat to make sure? No, they don't have the time to do that (those so-called “instant” thermometers take close to half a minute to give their readings). Having experience they can tell by feel what stage of cooking that meat has reached. If you trail a line cook and poke a thermometer in every steak just off the grill, you'd find the internal temperature of each is within a few degrees of what it is supposed to be. And when you start broiling 40 to 50 steaks per hour on a regular basis, you can quit using the thermometer, too. Cooking triggers a series of chemical reactions between proteins and other lesser
Choosing the right cooking method Here are three important things to remember in meat cooking: 1. Most of the tough connective tissue slowly converts into soft gelatin with heat. But as the meat temperature first begins to rise, connective tissue shrinks and becomes even tougher. It shrinks a great deal between 140 ° and 167°F (60° and 75°C). It only begins to convert into soft gelatin near the boiling temperature of water, at or above 200 °F (94°C). Any tough meat has to come up to this temperature before it becomes tender. 2. When you heat meat, the meat fibers toughen. The softest, most tender meat is raw meat. The higher the meat temperature you reach, the tougher the meat fibers are. If you want to know more on the microscopic scale, here is what happens. The tightly coiled peptide chains (the main protein components of meat tissues), start unfolding on heating. Eventually, these unfolded chains join to each other to form larger and larger aggregates. They finally reach such a large size that they can no longer remain in solution and precipitate. This process, called coagulation, occurs somewhere between 135 ° and 167°F (57° and 75°C). The more coagulation, the tougher the fibers become. You can actually see this happening—the meat turns from translucent to opaque. 3. The browning (or Maillard) reaction adds significantly to the flavor of meat (see discussion below). To get the maximum tenderness from meat, we have to make serious compromises on the differing cooking needs of the connective tissue and meat fibers. If we raise the temperature of the meat too high, we end up with fully softened connective tissues and fully toughened meat fibers. At too low a temperature, just the opposite happens: tough connective tissues and tender fibers. Meat research scientists have found that the best compromise for handling these two opposites is to cook the meat to an internal temperature between 140 ° and 147°F (60° and 64°C). If you're cooking meat that’s tender to start with, a tenderloin, for example, your major concern is to keep the fibers from toughening, which means you can remove it from the heat at a lower internal temperature. You need not worry about the small amount of connective tissue—tender cuts have very little. What grade the inspector assigned to your piece of meat also has consequences on the final flavor and tenderness. The correct final internal temperature is particularly critical with lower grade meats. Research has shown that Choice grade beef keeps its flavor intensity even if overcooked, though overcooking toughens it. The lower Select grade beef loses its flavor under the same conditions and turns even tougher than Choice grade. But remember this crucial point: The final internal temperature has more effect on tenderness than either the age of the meat or its marbling. That's why a good meat thermometer is so important. A good cook is never without a good thermometer. So how do restaurant chefs and line cooks in a steak house know when the meat is done? Do they poke a thermometer into each piece of meat to make sure? No, they don't have the time to do that (those so-called “instant” thermometers take close to half a minute to give their readings). Having experience they can tell by feel what stage of cooking that meat has reached. If you trail a line cook and poke a thermometer in every steak just off the grill, you'd find the internal temperature of each is within a few degrees of what it is supposed to be. And when you start broiling 40 to 50 steaks per hour on a regular basis, you can quit using the thermometer, too. Cooking triggers a series of chemical reactions between proteins and other lesser