Two ways to make very lean meat tender and one to make it tasty....

Today's Post: Thursday, 3-3-2011

There are 3 reasons to want to use very lean meat.

1. Game animals and those fed only grass or their natural foods produce meat that is less likely to make you fat or harm your health. That’s because they don’t eat the starches in corn and other grains nor the excess omega 6 oils in corn or the herbicides and pesticides in the grain. They also move around a lot unlike the cattle and other animals purposely penned up in feed lots or stalls to fatten them.

So, these meats are quite lean. They not only have far less omega oils and less saturated fat, they have less total fat too.

2. Most of the health harming things in the meat from grain and factory farm fed animals is in the fat. So if you buy leaner cuts, and trim all the visible fat and then do it a second time, you avoid most of the excess saturated fat, excess omega 6 oils, and the bioconcentrated herbicides and pesticides too as most of those are in the fat. It also may make sense to cook such meats in two stages and pour off the fat that can be drained off after the first stage before doing the final cooking or cooking with other ingredients you intend to eat to remove more of the fat.

But you wind up with very lean meat when you do that.

3. One of the reasons animals are penned to fatten them is to make them tender due to the higher fat content. So, until now, fattier cuts have cost more. So, if you buy the cheaper cuts to save money – which a lot of people are now doing, again you get leaner cuts of meat.

But you can cook lean meats in a way that makes them tender instead of like eating very tough leather.

I. One way that does the job and makes cooking meat or dishes with meat as a key ingredient is to use a Crockpot or other “slow cooker.” This has two other advantages too. It is much more time efficient for busy people who work as the meat or meat dish can be slow cooking while you are at work. It also avoids the potentially carcinogenic by products of cooking with high heat and also cooks the meat thoroughly to kill off any bacteria or harmful life forms in the meat without making the meat tough.

But, with such lean meats, even though slow cooking makes them tender enough to eat without having to chew forever, it still leaves the meat a bit less tender than you might like.

II. But that problem has been solved too!

With grass fed beef or lamb or bison or game, there is a device you can use before cooking that does the job.

And, with grain fed meat and cheaper cuts of grain fed meat, using this device before the first stage of cooking not only makes the end result a good bit more tender, it allows more fat to be cooked off and drained before you finish cooking the meat in stage 2.

I’m indebted to Chef Narsai David and his cooking feature that is sometimes on radio station KCBS in San Francisco for this one.

He heard of this device; tested it and found it works great; and did a feature on it.

It’s called the Impressor by Butcher’s Kitchen. http://butcherskitchen.com is the website where it’s sold for $69.99. And they also have videos so you can see how to use it. It’s essentially a way to use a grid of tiny piercing knife blades to cut the fibers of the meat and make multiple small holes in it.

So, if you know these reasons to use lean meat and want to enjoy eating meat occasionally each month and every month, this is a really good tool to use.

As I remember, when Narsai David got the excellent results with it, he used it all over the piece of meat either twice or three times rather than once.

But the results he got were well worth it.

III. The other problem with lean meat is that many of the flavors that make it taste so good such as onion and garlic and other spices work best when they blend into and are carried by fats and oils. But, with lean cuts of meat or lean cuts you have trimmed or cooked part of the remaining fat from, these flavoring effects are reduced.

That’s easily solved by including some extra virgin olive oil in the cooking process. This oil has many documented health benefits instead of health harms; but it works as well or better carrying and blending with these flavors to make the meat it’s cooked with taste good.