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| This isn't even my final form |
As I said in previously "what I'm going to give you in this mini-series is a not a how-to-cook guide, rather a bunch of recipes, preparation tips and ideas", combine this with the fact that meat generally tastes pretty good and therefore needs little to no fancy business and you probably shouldn't expect any huge revelations here. Anyway you might pick up a tip or two and you are probably just mindlessly browsing the internet in a perpetual state of 'what the hell am I doing with my life?', so why not waste your time here.
Salt your meat - if you don't, you are wrong.
Not only is salt incredibly important for those who train but salting meat (especially beef and lamb) properly can transform a so-so cut into a slice of meaty heaven. How do we salt a piece of meat 'properly'?
- Weigh your meat (if bone-in, make an estimate of the weight sans bone)
- Measure out 0.5-0.8% of the weight of your meat in salt (go to the higher end for tougher cuts or if you really like salt)
- Rub the salt into the meat.
- Rest for a minimum of 1 hr for small steaks, overnight or even multiple days for bigger cuts.
- Stick in a sandwich bag and put in the fridge for longer rests (unless you have a suitable environment for dry ageing meat, which, if you are reading this, you likely don't).
- Cook and enjoy
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| Yes, you have to do a little bit of maths. Here is 1.8 kg of topside and 13.5 g salt. No need to get the quantum calculator out. |
How is this in any way special, you may ask. Well, many people will salt meat before cooking, but not many home cooks will salt and rest meat, and this steakhouse secret is where the magic happens, and by magic, I mean science. Without getting too nerdy, this is what happens.
- Salt initially draws water out of the meat via osmosis.
- This water dissolves the salt, forming a concentrated brine on the meat.
- This brine permeates back into the meat, performing 2 actions.
- Firstly, the salt denatures some of the proteins in the meat, unwinding some of the tightly knit structures and allowing the meat to hold onto a greater percentage of moisture once cooked. This makes the meat more tender.
- Secondly, the salt is now distributed throughout the meat; salt is a flavour enhancer, so this seasoning of the entire cut of meat as opposed to just the surface makes for meatier tasting meat.
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| Cheap roasting beef + a bit of science = a not bad steak |
This very small amount of time and effort can make inexpensive beef eat like a decent steak. Especially if you know how to cook it...speaking of.
Cook your beef like a fucking pro - Finish high, start low. That is the mantra to cooking a delicious chunk of cow. When applied to steaks this is usually called the 'reverse sear method', but the general principles can be expanded to a range of meats.
The idea behind the reverse sear is to bring the entirety of the meat to the required 'doneness' using a gentle heat that will create a very even cook and then finish with a quick blast of heat to trigger the Maillard reaction that adds hugely to the depth of flavour. Compare this to a piece of meat cooked for a shorter time at a consistent medium-high heat, generally the meat will have a gradient of 'doneness' when looking at a cross section, with a relatively overcooked at the outer comparative to the centre.
The really fancy way to do this (and the way many steakhouses do it) is to use 'sous vide' for the first step, which is a fancy way of saying vacuum pack the meat and put it in a water bath set at a precise temperature. For example a medium rare steak would go in a 52 °C water bath, equilibrate at this temperature after an hour or 2, at which point a quick sear in a pan to form a nice golden crust makes for a perfect steak every time.
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| Sous vide is the reverse sear for restaurants and rich people, but this method can give you results that are almost as good. |
The basic premise is as follows:
- Cook your meat in an oven that isn't far (10-20 °C) above the desired final serving temperature until the centre of the meat reaches said temperature (eg. 55-60 °C for a medium steak)
- Whip it out of the oven, then either crank the oven to full heat, or get a pan raging hot.
- Chuck your perfectly cooked meat in your smoking hot oven/pan for the shortest possible time to achieve a golden brown crust (patting the meat dry with a paper towel before searing helps)
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| If I can do it, so can you. Note the even finish on the interior and the deep golden brown crust. |
The best way to monitor step 1 is with a meat thermometer (which I highly recommend), but with a bit of practice, the old poke and guess technique is usually good enough, and if in doubt a cut and peek won't necessarily ruin a steak. Any meat that is of a roughly homogeneous composition and you would want to keep at a precise temperature will benefit greatly from this method: beef roasts, lamb shanks, skin-on chicken breast; the limiting factor is really how much time you can be bothered to commit.
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| A 4 kg rump roast that was smoked for 6 hrs. Same rules apply regardless of cooking medium. |
Slow cooking is the lazy gourmet's panacea - any meat that is either somewhat fatty or has a significant amount of tough connective tissue can and should be cooked low and slow. This means whole chickens or and single cut that isn't the breast, any piece of beef that isn't a classic steak cut, and most lamb and pork (but especially shoulders).
Slow cooking may really be the most idiot proof of all cooking techniques:
Slow cooking may really be the most idiot proof of all cooking techniques:
- Cut your meat to fit (if necessary), brown in a pan if desired (you can usually skip this)
- Season generously, add herbs/spices/whatever else you think will taste good
- Add some liquid (anything from a small splash to about 2/3 full); this can be just water or stock, beer, soda...
- Put the lid on, set it to low (usually somewhere around 100 °C) for most things, high (usually somewhere around 140 °C) for if you are a bit more time pressed
I outlined a very hand-wavey recipe for my pulled pork cooking sauce in the last instalment, but I'll reprint it as I'm nice. So for step 1 above, get a few kilos of pork shoulder, then for steps 2 and 3, mix up the following (scaling up or down as necessary):
In general pork does the best with sweetness and complex flavours in the cooking sauce, beef doesn't like sweet and generally doesn't need many extra flavours, if I'm slow cooking brisket in a similar way to the above, I'll just use salt, pepper and smoked paprika. Chicken is probably the most versatile meat, you can throw super flavourful marinades at it or just cook it in a brine and it will turn out pretty well. Just experiment, if something sounds like it would taste good, it probably will, if it sounds like an unholy union of disparate flavours, maybe give it a miss. If you are still unsure which flavours to opt for with each meat, below there is an extremely handy, if aesthetically displeasing chart for your consideration.- 200 ml Diet Cherry Coke or Dr. Pepper
- 3-5 teaspoons smoked paprika
- 2 finely minced garlic cloves or 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 teaspoon chilli powder
- 1/4 teaspoon cumin
- 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon black Pepper
- 2 teaspoons salt
Two ways to roast a chicken (that are better than whatever you do now) - Most people don't roast whole chickens any more, but I have no idea why. Unless you are eating super-low fat (which would be a debatable strategy), whole chickens are regularly cheaper, offer a range of macro profiles depending on the cut you eat (breasts for low fat meals, legs for higher fat meals) and simply have so much more flavour than skinless, boneless breasts.
Roasting a chicken in the conventional manner isn't a particularly hard task, stick it on a baking tray and put it in the oven at somewhere around 190 °C for between 1 and 2 hours depending on whether you have a little baby or some roided up monstrosity. The problem is, simple roasting can regularly give you dried out breast meat or underdone legs. One option is the divide and conquer, get your butcher hat on and hack those birds up, then give the legs more time in the oven than the breasts, but ... hassle.
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| This idea 100% stolen from The Food Lab |
Significantly easier (though admittedly still a bit of hassle) is to split those bad boys right down the back bone (or cut it out if you have some good shears)then press down hard on the breast bone to flatten the whole bird out. Whack the butterflied (or spatchcocked if you want to use a silly word) chicken on a flat tray and hammer it with heat (like 200-210 °C). Through the magic of an increased exposed surface area and thinner profile the chicken will cook much faster (under an hour, probably around 45 mins) and the smaller legs on the outside of the pan will cook even faster than the larger breast on the inside of the pan, which means everything ends up perfectly cooked all at once. Crispy skin all over and ease of carving are just added goodies.
The easiest of all (though a longer cook) is to keep the chicken whole and simply flip it over. This exposes the legs to and shields the beast from the high heats, and will do so even better with a bed of veg and a splash of water or stock in the pan. Cook it at around 160 °C for an hour or two (sorry for the hand wavy directions, cooking is more of an art than a science), when it seems done (even better, when the breast is above 65 °C and the legs 75 °C), take it out, flip it back over, whack the oven or grill as hot as it goes and chuck it back in for a 10 minute crisp up. Poultry perfection.
No fuss fish - Cooking fish can be a royal pain in the arse. It's easy to dry out in the oven and because it's delicate can stick and fall apart if cooked in a pan. To help with either problem, baking paper is a kitchen superhero. If you are cooking your fish in the oven, grab a rectangle of baking paper and fold your fish plus herbs/lemon/veg/whatever into a nice neat little parcel. This allows everything to steam and cook in it's own juices, so drying out or getting bland, diluted flavours aren't a worry. If you'd rather pan cook your fish, the most simple but game-changing technique: line your pan with baking paper. The paper has a super high heat tolerance and an incredibly non stick surface, so you can still crisp up the fish skin, get a nice sear and just slide it out of the pan. No sticking, no falling apart.
Perfect poached eggs, en mass - This one requires two of my favourite kitchen tools, a slow cooker and a meat thermometer, but if you have both, it is absolutely worth the minimal hassle (alternatively, if you have a fancy pants sous vide set up, this is absolute child's play). Eggs are super awesome in how versatile they are, depending on the time and temperature at which you boil and egg, can get any combination of textures from the yolk and white. This awesome egg calculator tool tells all and says it better than I could: "Want fudgy yolks and runny whites? Runny yolks and custard-like whites? Jammy yolks and tender whites? Whatever you're after, this tool can help you achieve it".
My go to 'slow poached egg' recipe is to hold the eggs at 75 °C for 15 min. This gives you runny yolks and just-holding-shape-but-still-pretty-soft whites. To do so, chuck as many eggs as you want in your slow cooker (but don't fill it much beyond half way), add boiling and cold water, fiddling around until you get the temperature right and the eggs covered, switch the slow cooker to low and bugger off for quarter of an hour, returning to find delicious slow poached eggs, conveniently still in their shell, ready to be cracked on top of/into any and every meal that you have.
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| You will be adding poached eggs to absolutely everything. |
