On Food and Cooking

cutting meat. Procedures Meat animals are generally slaughtered as untraumatically as possible. Each anim ...

The word game is Germanic in origin. Its original meaning in Old English was “amusement,” “sport ...

cold-water bath or cold-air blast. Prolonged water-chilling can add a significant amount of water to the carcass ...

keep as long as conventionally processed meats. Rigor Mortis The Importance of Timing, Posture, and Temperature ...

much; otherwise the filaments bunch up and bond very tightly and the meat becomes exceptionally tough. Even ...

change, during which it gets progressively more flavorful. Meat also becomes more tender. In the 19th centu ...

while the moderate humidity causes the meat to lose moisture gradually, and thus become denser and more ...

...And Diminish Toughness Uncontrolled enzyme activity also tenderizes meat. Enzymes called calpains mainly ...

range, the higher the temperature, the faster the enzymes work. Some accelerated “aging” can take place during c ...

sometimes moldy surface. Most meat is now butchered into retail cuts at the packing plant shortly after ...

seen, slow cooking gives the aging enzymes a chance to do in a few hours what would otherwise take week ...

break meat down into the retail cuts at the packing house, vacuum-wrap them in plastic precisely to avoi ...

with aging — the generation of flavor and tenderness by enzymes throughout the meat — are desirable. But the cha ...

so its development limits how long we can age and store meat. Unsaturated fats are most susceptible to rancidity, ...

antioxidant activity: for example the Mediterranean herbs, especially rosemary (p. 395). Browning the meat surf ...

these stinky compounds. Refrigeration In the developed world, the most common domestic method for preserving meat ...

frozen meat will keep for millennia, as has been demonstrated by the discovery of mammoth flesh ...

readily ends up dry, dense, and tough. Cooked meat suffers less from freezing because its tissue ...

remove liquid water from the muscle fluids, the increasing concentration of salts and trace metals promotes th ...

the meat surface which scatter light and so appear white. The meat surface is now in effe ...