Health and Fitness

What You Should Know Before Cooking Meat for Dinner

Meat preparation is often the best way to get delicious results from a dish. As beef and pork, especially, become leaner due to consumer demand, people seek to add more flavor and tenderness. Chefs like you also seek to heed food safety tips to avoid hazards that can come from improperly cooking and handling meat.

How to Get the Most Flavor

One of the most effective ways you can add flavor to meat is simply by the means you use to cook it. You can add flavor to steaks or even roasts by pan-searing them stovetop or on the grill. The brown crust you obtain from short exposure to high heat is full of flavor.

Additionally, you must make sure you cook meat at appropriate temperatures and time lengths regardless of your method. The flavor and texture of any meat suffers considerably from overcooking it.

You can also add flavor to meat with certain herbs. Consider stems from herbs like oregano or rosemary.

Fat adds amazing flavor to meats, and that is why people love marbling so much on prime cuts of ribeye or Porterhouse steaks. However, you can also use fat to add flavor by resting a slice of cooked meat on leftover beef drippings or topping it with butter or duck trimmings. Adding fat for flavoring is especially effective for lean cuts of meat. Marinades add fat usually in the form of oils and additional flavors by seasoning.

Spice rubs are often more effective at adding flavor to beef than marinades. Also, never discount the dimensions simple black pepper, and sea salt can add to meat.

Aromatics like garlic or onions can add flavor when you add them to meats to help finish them or when you sautee them and use them to dress the precooked cut of beef or chicken. Dry brines like salt or brown sugar can draw flavor as well as moisture deeper into thick, tough cuts of beef. The key to preparing meats is to not apply rubs, seasoning, or marinades too early, especially for beef where you can remove too much moisture with salt.

Food Safety

You should never ignore basic food safety tips for any kind of food, but meat is especially risky. Unless you plan on cooking beef or poultry immediately upon bringing it home from the market, you should refrigerate it. Safe chilling temperatures are 40 degrees Fahrenheit or lower.

If you have no plans to use your purchased beef or chicken cuts within two days, you should freeze the meat. Chicken can last nine months with flavor and quality intact, while steaks and roasts can go a year in the freezer. You can only get away with freezing pork for about six months and ground meat of any kind only about three or four months.

When you thaw meat in preparation for cooking, the refrigerator or direct cooking is the safest method. Trying to thaw meat at room temperature allows bacteria to flourish as their optimal temperatures for rapid growth are between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

A safe cooking temperature for most meats is 160 degrees Fahrenheit and higher. However, many people enjoy rare to medium-rare steaks, which only reach 130 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit. An interesting and important sidenote here is that rare steak cooks at sufficiently high temperatures to kill surface bacteria, and harmful pathogens generally don’t migrate to the meat’s interior. In contrast, you should never eat poultry if its internal temperature has not reached 165 degrees Fahrenheit as you run the risk of exposure to life-threatening and antibiotic-resistant Salmonella and Campylobacter. In addition to bacteria like E.coli and Salmonella, eating undercooked pork can lead to parasites like Trichinella.

Food safety must extend to surfaces where you prepare other parts of your meal. Avoid allowing vegetables, for example, to come in contact with utensils and cutting boards you may have used for raw meat.

How to Tenderize Meat

Although brines and marinades may add some flavor to meats, they mainly serve to tenderize otherwise tough cuts. Tenderizing with special liquids, as opposed to mere flavoring, usually involves hours of soaking before cooking. Brines are more common for pork and poultry, although chefs may also utilize them for beef briskets.

Some meat tenderizers come in the form of commercial powders that offer little additional flavor. Dry brines like salt and brown sugar rubs are surprisingly effective at creating juicy and tender beef.

The old-fashioned method of tenderizing meat is simply to use a meat mallet and physically thin the steaks or chops, breaking the tough muscle fibers in the process. Finally, cooking at low heat for prolonged periods, such as in a smoker, will break down the collagen in meat, creating a tasty and tender roast or rack of ribs.

Many people concede cooking meat is an art. Finding ways to get the most flavor, following crucial food safety tips, and utilizing various tenderizer methods are a few tips you should master before cooking meat.

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