they cook quickly, and suffer more from
overcooking. Grilled chops and steaks may be
just right at the center but dry elsewhere;
long-braised pot roasts and stews are often dry
throughout.
The cook’s margin of error in cooking
meat is narrower than it used to be. So it’s
more useful than ever to understand how the
various methods for cooking meat work, and
how best to apply them to the meat of the 21st
century.
Modifying Texture Before
and After Cooking
There are a number of traditional techniques
that tenderize tough meat before cooking, so
that the cooking itself, and the drying of the
muscle fibers, can be minimized. The most
straightforward of these is to damage the meat
structure physically, to fragment the muscle
fibers and connective-tissue sheets by