Quick Guide To Cooking With Meats

General Observations

CEBU, Philippines - Hygiene. Always wash hands before handling meat, even if you do not expect to touch it with bare hands. Wash for at least 30 seconds, reaching in below fingernails. If handling two or more batches of different kinds of meat, wash each time. Do not talk while handling or preparing meat, because tiny drops of saliva will fall on it. Make sure that all cutting surfaces and utensils are sterilized in between different batches of meat, because some bacteria may cross-contaminate, and bacteria that are relatively harmless in one kind of meat may grow fast in another kind.

Defrosting. The best way to defrost is to leave it in the refrigerator or chiller and warm up slowly to just above freezing. Learn from experience how long this takes depending on the kind of meat and how large the pieces, whether the pieces are frozen together, and so forth. No matter what, NEVER allow meat to If you leave meat out at room temperature and come back tomorrow, you will notice that a lot of fluid has seeped out of the meat; the flavor has seeped out with it. (This is contrary to what some traditional French chefs taught; the French tended to prefer bland meat and give it flavor with heavy sauces.) An alternate way to defrost is to microwave; do this only when ready to cook immediately; and it is never satisfactory for large chunks of meat or a whole chicken. Meat MUST be defrosted before you attempt to cook it. If you try to cook frozen meat, eventually it will get cooked but it will get very hard and tough, or rubbery.

Appraising Meat. Color: Chicken and pork should be a bright pink color, not white, greenish, or grayish. Beef and lamb should be bright red, not dark red or brown. Marbling: refers to bits of fat mixed in with the meat (beef, lamb, pork); in general, the more marbling and the larger and more widely-distributed the fats, the tastier the meat will be. Some cuts naturally have more marbling than others.

Cutting. Meat is muscle, which is a fiber (like rope), so the fibers run in a certain direction. As a generality, cut across the grain to cut the fibers and make the meat seem more tender; fajitas are made this way from tough flank steak in thin slices; filet mignon even though already tender is also cut across the grain, in thicker slices. In other cases, the way to cut is dictated by the bone structure.

Cubing, Dicing, and Grinding. Some meat is cut into small cubes with a knife; adobo is

frequently made with cubed pork. Grinding is a way of mashing the meat so as to totally tear the fibers apart; the grind can be set to different sizes to result in different qualities of –g ground to a large size then part or all of it is ground again fine; this may be done to give the meat more cohesion (ability to stick together, as in a patty). Some meat recipes that call for ground meat taste better if made with hand-diced meat; dicing is cubing but in very small pieces. Reminder: while preparing meat, do NOT talk or even breathe heavily over the meat.