Duck flavoured Beef fillet, potato rosti, ginger and orange sorbet with an orange sauce, orange caramel and a basil and radish salad.
No, this is not something I will ever cook again and no it will never make it to any restaurant menu, I suspect ever.
Yes it is a complete waste of a nice bit of beef fillet, and yes I am slightly worried that I spend my time doing this kind of thing rather than making a nice stew like any sane person would.
It does however prove a very good point. One, which many people choose to ignore, and one, which if taken on board will help you cook meat properly every time, without fail.
When we cook meat we're not just simply heating up a cold bit of meat. It’s much more complicated than that. Raw meat is edible but it’s pretty bland. If steak tartar didn’t have all its seasonings it would hardly be worth eating.
Take sashimi for an example. Next time you eat sashimi close your eyes and have someone feed you different fish cuts and see if you can tell what each one is. Its difficult because the flavours are not as pronounced as cooked meat. Sashimi is all about delicate flavour, fantastic texture and visual presentation. Its also usually marinated or served with a dipping sauce or some other accompaniment. Don’t get me wrong I love the flavour of raw meats but it would get bullied into a corner if you tried serving it with some cooked meat accompaniments.
Uncooked meats are mostly made up of large protein molecules and water. These protein molecules have no smell and very little taste. When we cook meats we denature these molecules. At low temperatures 40oC-60oC we are simply affecting the texture of the meat and the meat still has very little flavour. As we increase the temperature to over 70oC we actually begin to lose some of the moisture in the food and if we cook it for long enough at temperatures much higher than this we risk drying out the meat and ruining the flavour entirely.
So where do we get our flavour from?
Well two places actually. We get a lot of flavour from the fats and connective tissues (in fact every bit apart from the meat itself). Fat contains most if not all of the flavour and odorerant molecules in a piece of meat. Hence why slow roasting a fatty piece of meat yields such good results. As we cook at high temperatures + 80oC the fat and collagen melts, bastes the meat from the inside and outside and keeps it moist. At the same time the flavour and odorant molecules are released into the dish and the pan below. We then use these juices in the pan to make gravy, add to a stock or baste the piece of meat by hand. Fat isn’t a universal flavour, it is very individual to what it is attached to.
The other source and the largely misunderstood source of flavour comes from a chemical reaction at temperatures above 140oC. It is at this temperature that we get browning reactions on the meat. That dark caramel brown colour that we see when we pan fry a piece for meat or roast it at high temperatures is not in fact caramalization at all. Caramalisation is a very small part of what is going on but to understand the browning of meat solely based on caramalisation is much the same as understanding the theory of relativity by looking up the word ‘relative’ in the dictionary.
The whole picture of what’s going on still not fully understood, even by scientists but a very smart French chemist named Louis-Camille Mailard discovered that it was largely a result of a chemical reaction between the amino acids in the proteins and the sugars at high temperatures. It is for this reason that the result is referred to as the Mailard Reactions.
These reactions result in literally hundreds of new flavour compounds. And it is the same reaction that makes fries, bread, and coffee and meat taste so damn good.
So why should you be bothered by what causes the meat to brown? Well its useful because to understand that this is a chemical compound rather than just burnt bits of meat or a sweet sticky sugar substance lets us explore many more ways to benefit from it.
Why do we brown meats before we braise them?
Why do we deglaze a pan after frying meat?
Why do we roast the bones before making a stock?
The answer to all of these is in most part because of the mailard reactions. You see not only can we flavour the meat itself; we can also pass this chemical compound onto something else. Like a sauce or a stock or maybe even another type of meat?
I have unnecessarily big issues with referring to the browning of meats as sealing. I don’t much mind the word sear but I find using the word seal extremely misleading and confusing. We used to say we seal the meat because cooks genuinely thought that browning the meat sealed in some of the juices. We now know that to be an absolute untruth, so why we still use it, why we still continue to perpetuate a myth I will never understand. Why not call it browning or flavouring the meat? Surely then it would provide the novice cook with a better understanding of what he or she is doing even if he or she wasn’t aware of any of the science behind it.
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