The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

We’ve got the vegetables in there, now for a few
ingredients to up the meaty backbone of the loaf, namely
deploying my trusty umami bombs: anchovies, Marmite,
and soy sauce. All three of these ingredients are rich in
glutamates and inosinates, chemical compounds that trigger
signals that tell our brains we’re eating something savory
and meaty. They make the meat loaf taste meatier without
imparting a distinct flavor of their own. After sautéing all the
ingredients for my flavor base together—the vegetables and
the umami bombs—I added some chicken stock and
buttermilk, along with softened gelatin, and reduced to a
concentrated liquid simply bursting with flavor.
Mixing this flavor base into my meat produced a mixture
wetter than any other meat loaf mix I’d seen. This led to a
moister end product (that retained moisture with the help of
the gelatin), but it proved problematic when shaping the
loaf. I could bake it in a loaf pan, but I prefer making free-
form loaves on a baking sheet to maximize surface area for
flavorful browning or glazing. The solution was to use a
hybrid method. I packed my meat loaf mix into a loaf pan,
covered it with foil, and then inverted the whole thing onto a
rimmed baking sheet, spreading out the foil so that I now
had a foil-lined baking sheet with an inverted meat loaf and
loaf pan on top of it. I baked this way for about half an hour
—just long enough to set its shape—and then used a spatula
and kitchen towels to lift off the pan. The result was a
perfectly loaf-shaped meat loaf (just right for slicing into
sandwiches), with all the advantages of a free-form loaf and
its extra surface area.
You can leave your meat loaf completely undressed, but I