Meat Flashcards
What is the composition of meat?
- Water: 75%
- Protein (complete): 15-20%
- Fat: 5-40%
- Carbohydrates: basically 0%
- Vitamins and minerals: iron (heme, small amount but good source), phosphorous (excellent source), niacin/riboflavin (excellent source), thiamin (good source)
What are the types of proteins in meat and their functions and protein examples?
- Myofibrillar
- Function: contractile
- Proteins: myosil and actin
- Found in muscle/flesh of meat - Sarcoplasmic
- Function: transport oxygen
- Proteins: myoglobin (responsible for colour of meat, found in flesh), hemoglobin (found in blood) - Mitochondrial
- Function: chemical reactions
- Proteins: enzymes - Connective
- Function: structural
- Proteins: collagen, elastin
- Responsible for holding muscle to the bones, found in connective tissue of meat
What are the muscle fibre proteins and what occurs when you add heat?
- 2 proteins found in sarcoplasm of muscle fibres:
- Myosin (thick filaments) and actin (thin filaments)
- Heat causes denaturation and coagulation of muscle proteins
- Overheating causes over-coagulation = tough meat
- Muscle fibre proteins shrink and squeeze out water due to excessive hydrogen bonds forming = dry meat
What are the connective tissue proteins and what occurs when you add heat?
- Collagen: important role in determining tenderness
- More collagen = less tender
- Can be hydrolyzed into gelatin (more tender kind of meat) by various cooking methods - Elastin: rubber-like protein, really chewy
- Not affected by normal cooking procedures
- Must be removed
What is rigor mortis? How do you counteract it?
- Immediately after slaughter muscles are in contracted state = tough meat
- If meat is aged (held for specific period of time under controlled temperature conditions or 1-2 C) = increase in tenderness (muscles start to loosen)
- Proteolytic enzymes (cathepsins) in meat slowly break down bonds holding muscles in contracted state = increase in tenderness
- Meat is hung during aging = gravity stretches muscles, releasing them from contracted state
What are the factors influencing meat tenderness?
- Length of aging (rigor mortis)
- Tenderness increases as aging time increases - Age of animal
- Amount of connective tissue increases with age of animal
- Meat from young animals (pork and lamb) is more tender - Different species (beef vs pork vs chicken)
- Due to different amounts of connective tissue (ie. more muscles) - Specific muscle in animal
- Tenderness varies between muscles within same animal (some are stronger, exercise makes muscle fibers expand)
- Depends on amount of connective tissues in the muscle
- Most tender beef cut = tenderloin (filet mignon) - Method of cooking
- Moist heat cooking methods increase tenderness of less tender cuts
What is marbling? What are the types and which are juiciest?
- Fine white streaks or pockets of fat running through the lean part of a cut of meat
- 4 categories of marbling: trace, slight, small, modest
- Marbling enhances flavour and juiciness as many flavour elements found in fat
- Juicier (flavour) meat gives greater perception of tenderness (texture)
What are the Canadian beef grades?
- Canada Prime: must have slightly abundant marbling or higher
- Canada AAA: must have small marbling or higher
- Canada AA: must have at least slight marbling but less than small
- Canada A: must have at least trace marketing but less than small
- In Canada you cannot sell beef with hormones and antibiotics
What is Kobe beef?
- Exclusive grade of beef from cattle raised in the province of Tajima, Japan
- Kobe is the capital
- Pampered black-haired Wagyu cattle
- Massaged with sake (rice wine)
- Strictly controlled diet that includes beer mash in the summer to stimulate appetite
- Receive very little exercise and daily massages (“mellow, relaxed cows make good beef”)
- Extraordinary tender, full flavoured
- Very expensive ($500 per kg)
- Looks intensely marbled, looks like “it has been left out in the snow”
- Ratio of marbling to flesh is 10 times higher than any other beef
- Requires very, very careful cooking
- Pre-heated, extremely hot cast iron frypan or grill
- Crispy sear on outside
- Served “blue” or very very rare inside
What are the tender cuts of meat?
Along the vertebrate
- Rib steak/roast
- Rib wholesale cut
- Rib bone - Wing steak (looks like rib steak)
- Loin wholesale cut
- Rib bone - Sirloin steak/roast
- Sirloin wholesale cut
- Wedge or hip - T-bone steak (small tenderloin piece)
- Loin wholesale cut
- 1/2 vertebra - Porterhouse (bigger tenderloin piece)
- Loin wholesale cut
- 1/2 vertebra
What are dry heat cooking methods?
- High temperature (> or = 160 C)
- Short period of time to prevent overcoagulation which would lead to tough/dry meat
- No water at all
What are the types of dry heat cooking methods?
Used for tender cuts of meat
- Beef: less exercised areas of carcass (rib, loin, sirloin wholesale cuts) = contain less connective tissue (less collagen and elastin) = smaller diameter muscle fibres
- Pork and lamb: young animals = less connective tissue - small diameter muscle fibres
- Chicken and fish: little connective tissue, short and small muscle fibres
- Long, moist heat cooking is not required because of less connective tissue
- Use dry heat methods in order to keep distinctive flavour
What kinds of meat are cooked using the dry heat cooking methods?
- Broiling, frying, pan-broiling, BBQing, and deep fat frying
- Used for thin cuts (steaks, chops) - Baking/roasting
- Used for larger, thicker cuts (beef or pork roasts, whole chickens)
What happens when you overcook beef/pork/chicken?
- Too high a temperature or cooking too long
- Very easy to overcook tender meats
- Occurs more readily with dry heat methods
- Overcooking causes overcoagulation of muscle fibre proteins (actin and myosin)
- Results in toughness
- Overcoagulated proteins shrink and squeeze out water
Results in dryness - This is why people associate juiciness with tenderness
What happens when you overcook fish?
- Cooked fish flakes easily and is opaque in appearance
- Overcooking over-coagulates muscle fibre proteins = tough fish
- Over-coagulated proteins squeeze out water = dry fish, high concentration of fish flavour