Mastering the Grill_ The Owner's Manual for Outdoor Cooking - Andrew Schloss [30]
A word of caution: You can compare color only within one type of meat. Tender beef is darker and redder than tough pork. Toddler-age grass-fed veal has a rosier hue than milk-fed baby veal, but it is paler and tougher than a rack of spring lamb. That’s because the animals are raised differently.
The second rule of choosing meat is to look at texture. Large, tough muscle fibers will make the surface of a piece of tough meat look rough, like terrycloth. On the other hand, small, undeveloped fibers are barely visible, giving tender meat a sleek, silken appearance. The thickness of the connective tissue surrounding the fibers magnifies such differences. Thicker connective tissue makes a rough surface look even rougher. Undeveloped connective tissue is hardly noticeable.
Don’t confuse the opaque white veins that web the surface of most meats with connective tissue. These are veins of fat; connective tissue is transparent.
The third element to consider is the ratio of water to protein in any given piece of meat. Water is what makes meat juicy. Held within the muscle fibers, it will remain in the meat as long as the fibers stay intact. What makes a piece of meat juicy is the ratio of water content to protein content. The following chart gives relative percentages of water and protein for the most commonly butchered meats.
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PERCENTAGES OF WATER AND PROTEIN IN MEAT
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As you can see, pork has the lowest ratio of water to protein, which helps to explain why an unwatched grilled pork chop can dry up in a matter of minutes. But it’s also why pork is a good candidate for curing and smoking: These techniques concentrate the flavors in meat by reducing its moisture content. With less moisture to reduce, the flavors of pork concentrate easily.
Fish have a similar problem. They, too, can lose moisture instantaneously during cooking, but it happens for the opposite reason. Fish have the highest ratio of water to protein, but their protein is weak. When the protein filaments break, as they do when a fish overcooks, the juices easily flow out and the flesh becomes dry.
02. Fat
Fat is by far the most controversial element in meat. Cursed as a harbinger of obesity and heart disease, fat is the demon that most meat producers try to exorcise. For instance, today’s pork is about 31 percent leaner than it was twenty years ago, according to the National Pork Board. But by scrambling to rid their product of the unmentionable, meat marketers have done little to help consumers understand that fat is the key element that makes meat palatable.
Fat is the way animals store energy. The bulk of the fat is held in specialized cells, called adipose tissue, which are concentrated under the skin and around the outside of muscle groups. Adipose fat does not permeate meat; rather, it borders the lean sections and is often trimmed away during butchering. Except as a means of self-basting a roast or for rendering, adipose fat has little culinary benefit.
Only marbling, the barely visible veins of fat webbed throughout the lean parts of meat, affects palatability. Marbling makes meat more tender, more flavorful, and perceptibly moister. Here’s how it works: When an animal eats more calories than it needs, the excess is stored as adipose fat. If the animal continues to eat to excess, the adipose cells eventually become overfilled. The overflow is rerouted directly into the organs and muscles themselves, causing the muscles to become marbled and flabby, a trait that does not serve the health of the animal, but works wonders for its meat.
Marbling tenderizes meat in two ways. First, it stretches the connective tissue into thin sheets, making it more likely to soften during cooking,