meat and more meat Part one.

I introduce you to the benevolent, and astounding Bovine!

Now What is bovine you may ask? simply put it is cow. Delicious, un-adulterated cow. Broght from the heavens by

Lets start on meat, Meat is very, very cool.

Meat is composed of 72% water, 20% protein, 7% fat, and 1% minerals and vitamins.
The muscle itself is actually myofibrillar, which is pretty much long cords of tissue

Sorry about all of the science stuff, I just thought this was a great picture.

As you can see fro the picture, the myofibrillar  is both long and stringy, but also it is clumped up, the stuff that wraps around it is called perimyssium. This is very important, believe it or not, in cooking. Chefs always tell you to cut across the grain when cutting meat, well this is why! If you don't cut the meat in a certain way, you get these long super chewy ropes dangling around in your mouth, and that , my friends, is anti-good. 

The myofibrillar is also what makes tender pieces of meat, well, tender. The less used the muscle is the thinner the myofibrillar is, and therefore the meat is more "tender" and tends to be more sought out, and therefore more expensive.

There is much more to meat then the muscle. You see the muscle is a small part of what makes meat so beautiful and delicious. you have to think of more then just the protein structure, you have to think bones, you have to think sinew, and oh yes you have to think FAT.

Now that we have the actual protein down, lets get a little harder and slightly more porous, that's right, i'm talking about bones!

Hah. Mario. Awesome.

I mean we should have almost started with bones first! they are a beautiful, beautiful thing. Without bones we wouldn't have delicious rich and thick stocks and without stock, which i'm sure you are all aware is the foundation to cookery we are lost! (not to mention bone marrow, smothered on some lightly toasted bread.)

You may see bones as some kind of hard, lifeless thing, but you would be oh so, so,so, sososososo wrong. They are alive, and even better, They are full of stuff! They are crammed with fat, minerals and water, and ,possibly more importantly, they make things taste good. On top of that, they add richness because of the collagen, this also thickens stocks and soups or whatnot. The collagen, when heated, does its voodoo and breaks down into gelatin. So if you are making some home made stock and you throw it in the fidge, you should have jello in the morning.

So I was just looking it up, and collagen is used put into peoples faces to fix their ageing. That's kinda weird.

I give you collagen.

I had to swim through like 400 pictures for this little gem. Collagen is the silver stuff we find on our different cuts of meat. Depending on what you are going to do with the meat you may want to remove it, because when it is cooked hot and fast it tends to shrivel up and get really chewy. Although if you decide you want to take it gently by the hand and romance it, like you would with any fine lady, and cook it slow in some liquid at a lower heat, it will pretty much dissolve and become tender. Collagen also gives you flavor, so sometimes it's ok to leave some on.

Collagen does something else for us. It divides the meat. Collagen is what holds all of the things to the other things, if you will. It makes up 25%-30% of the entire body protein content.  Most of that is used as connective tissue.

Now, get ready for me to blow your mind. Collagen makes natural lines in the muscles, from those lines we get our cuts of meat. (it's ok to take a second before continuing, i'm sure that blew your mind.)

Oh yes, collagen rules.

Just for everyone's general knowledge. Collagen does not connect muscle to bone, that is a much tougher membrane called periostium. This stuff should be removed along with any bright red meat along the bones, you'll see it.

ONWARD! And back to fats! In and on these delicious little hunkets waiting to happen there are two kinds of delicious fats.subcatanious (outward) and Lumbar, or adipose (inward) fats. Let me show you the way.

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Yeah. I went there.

So Subcutanious, or should I say subnotinthemeatarious is outside of the meat, that's all the fat on the outer part of the meat. This external fat is used for cushioning and fat storage. I have read of butchers who can read the subcutanious fat like a book. pointing out where the feed changed or when it was stressed, kind of like a tree.. Then there is the adipose fat. That's marbling. I call it delicious. This is one of the major things you should look for when buying a steak.

Meat my friend Wagyu Kobe, He's delicious.

When buying a steak you should also notice the color of the fat. You want bright white smiling on you, if it's yellow that's a sign that the meat has gone rancid or is from an older cow and that the quality is not what you, as a knowledgeable cook, want. 

But meat, as we know it, comes from the cow is Divided into a couple of different parts. Usually you can get your butcher to do it, but, because this is my blog and I don't really care what you people want, i'm going to give you the entire break down. Now that you understand how meat and sinew and bones work, i'm going to show you how to break it down! 

I told you this was going to be awesome!