What makes tender meat tender

Low and slow cooking methods can help to tenderize tough meat cuts. An easy, low maintenance way to achieve this is by using a slow cooker. Set the meat to cook at a low temperature for hours, and be sure to add a sauce, marinade, or broth in order to keep your meat moist and flavorful.

With this method, meat is vacuum sealed and then cooked in a temperature controlled water bath. Cutting meat before it has had an opportunity to rest can leave you with dry, tough meat. Allow meat to rest before serving in order to allow the meat to redistribute the juices between muscle fibers and retain the moisture. After resting, slice against the grain of the meat in order to make chewing effortless as the meat fibers naturally fall apart in your mouth.

Your cheerful local Chinese restaurant is using economical stewing beef to make stir fries with ultra tender strips of beef by tenderising it! Proceed with stir fry recipe. It can be marinated with wet or dry seasonings, or cooked plain. Just like in stir fries made by your favourite Chinese restaurant!

You can use any high quality expensive steak in stir fries without tenderising which is what fine dining Asian restaurants do. Use this tenderising technique on budget steaks, not expensive steaks. Tenderising time differs for different cuts of beef. Even when I under or over tenderised, it was still tender and juicy. Even 10 minutes will suffice. Tenderised beef can be stir fried the traditional way — hard and fast on a hot stove in mere minutes — or even deep or shallow fried in oil like in this Crispy Mongolian Beef pictured below.

Whichever way you cook it, the beef comes out much more tender and juicy than even expensive cuts of beef like beef tenderloin! The flavour of the beef is not affected by the tenderising.

So the beef flavour will only be as good as the cut you use. Tenderising affects the texture not the flavour of the beef. Tenderising beef enables you to make fast-cook beef recipes using economical cuts of beef that usually require slow cooking to break down the tough fibres, like in Stews.

And it stays tender even if you overcook the beef! Hungry for more? Subscribe to my newsletter and follow along on Facebook , Pinterest and Instagram for all of the latest updates. You just need to cook clever and get creative!

Your email address will not be published. Notify me via e-mail if anyone answers my comment. We made beef with lo-mein noodles and your methodology was simple and yielded excellent results. We opted for flat iron steak. All meat—be it beef, pork, lamb, or chicken—consists of muscle, connective tissue, and fat.

Connective tissue is the broad term for ligaments, tendons, and the collagen membranes that hold muscle fi bers together. Fat can appear in thick layers over muscles and also as fine marbling between muscle fibers. When finely marbled fat melts during cooking, it enhances tenderness and adds succulence. Listed below are some of the most common tough and tender cuts; along with those that are neither exactly tough or tender but somewhere in between.

Neither tough nor tender cuts : Flank steak Chuck steak Top blade steak Skirt steak. If you want to know whether a cut of beef is naturally tough or tender, you need to know two things: how much connective tissue the cut contains, and how much exercise the muscle received.

The toughest cuts have a lot of connective tissue and come from a heavily exercised muscle. Exercise increases the amount of connective tissue within the muscles, making them tougher. The tenderest cuts are those that have very little connective tissue and come from a little-used muscle.

For a list of tough and tender cuts, see the diagram on the facing page. So which muscles work the hardest and have the most connective tissue? The large muscles that connect to the hips and shoulders, however, work a lot and have more connective tissue, so meat from those areas round or rump roasts from the hip, chuck from the shoulder is generally on the tougher side.

By its very composition, meat poses a challenge to cooks. The more you cook muscle, the more the proteins will firm up, toughen, and dry out. But the longer you cook connective tissue, the more it softens and becomes edible.

By the time connective tissue is becoming edible, the muscle has completely overcooked. So the trick to getting good results is deciding at the outset what sort of treatment the beef needs. Is it a mostly tender cut that needs to be cooked only long enough to make it safe to eat and develop good flavor? Or is it a mostly tough cut that needs ample time for connective tissue to break down?

The slice will therefore be thinner and softer. The foil will protect the meat and the work surface, but you can not put it on if you prefer. As an alternative to the meat tenderizer you can use the hand : hit the slice of meat with the carpus of the hand, with a firm movement that goes outwards. If you want to bread or fry the slice of meat, use the meat tenderizer with the tips, beating the piece for a couple of minutes on both sides, so as to break the connective tissues of the meat.

It is a method not suitable, however, for tenderising steaks to be cooked in a pan or on the grill, but only for slices to be fried or breaded. If instead you want to prepare a steak , using a cheap cut, you can soften it with salt.

In this case the piece of meat must be at least 4 centimeters thick: the thickness will allow the meat to create an external crust, preserving its internal cooking. To eliminate excessive humidity from the piece of meat, pass it in coarse salt : sprinkle both sides and leave to rest for at least 1 hour, so as to eliminate excess water, leaving fat and protein. Rinse the meat and dry it well before cooking.

Remember that the more you leave the meat in salt, the more tender it will be: it can rest for up to 24 hours. For the thinner cuts of meat you can try the acid marinade , that is based on citrus fruits, vinegar or wine, which break the muscle fibers of the meat, so as to make it more tender in cooking. Leave the meat to marinate in a mix of vinegar and lemon juice overnight. Keep in mind, however, that vinegar and lemon tend to flavor the meat.

For this reason, it is advisable to use this method if you need to prepare cutlets or even meat with tomato sauce. In the latter case, the tomato will also help to soften the meat.