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.

. 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

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