Why tenderize beef

Aim for 30 minutes to two hours, but check periodically to see if the meat is starting to look cooked around the edges. Several fruits, such as papaya , pineapple, kiwi and Asian pear, contain enzymes that help tenderize meat.

Bromelain, the powerful enzyme found in this fruit, can work a little too well. Heavily salting a tough cut of meat and letting it sit an hour or two before you cook it is an effective way to break down tough muscle fibers, no fussy marinade needed. There are a couple of clever knife tricks that can make meat seem more tender. One is scoring. This method can help break up tough proteins and also helps the meat absorb tenderizing marinades more easily.

The second meat-tenderizing knife trick is slicing cooked steak thinly, across the grain. Recipe Search. Seasonal Recipes. Our Newest Recipes. Recipes A to Z.

Grilling Cooking Tips and Advice. Grilling and Broiling Chicken. Seasonal Cooking Tips. Seasonal Cooking Videos. Either way, melting the collagen in meat tenderizes it and adds to the flavor. You can also break down the collagen in meat with a mallet. This is a useful technique for tenderizing a steak. There are a number of fancy machines and tools to do this, but the most basic way is with a wooden or metal meat mallet. Meat mallets usually have two surfaces—a flat side and a side with a lot of little points on it.

Pounding a steak with the pointy side of the mallet will cut up the connective tissues as well as the muscle fibers themselves. This allows a steak with a lot of connective tissue to be cooked over high heat without being too tough to eat.

Steaks tenderized like this are sometimes called cube steaks , because the indentations created by the mallet are shaped like cubes. Cube steaks won't be as succulent as braised beef chuck , for example, and you'll certainly never mistake them for beef tenderloin. But pounding is a quick and easy way to tenderize a steak.

Pounding also has the advantage of flattening the meat, which allows it to cook more quickly and more evenly. The longer a steak spends over the heat, the drier it gets. And since dry meat is tougher, preserving the juices will produce a more tender steak.

Finally, there's slicing—specifically, slicing thinly and against the grain. Flank steak happens to have very long muscle fibers, and they run the length of the steak.

You could cook a flank steak perfectly medium rare , but if you sliced it along the grain, it would feel like you were chewing a mouthful of rubber bands. Slicing against the grain shortens those fibers, which means much less work for your jaws and teeth. Fortunately, steaks that most need to be sliced against the grain are the ones with the most pronounced, visibly obvious grain, so you can easily tell which direction to slice.

Even if it takes a moment to orient yourself, it's a moment well spent. Cook it, pound it, or slice it—that's it. Instead, he ran it through a commercial version of a jacquard meat tenderizer. The home version looks like this, with many small pointy blades or needles to penetrate the meat:.

Picture from Chef's Catalog. They are used to create many, many small cuts in the meat, physically severing the connective tissue and making it more tender. The most frequent home use is to make cube steakl; they are also often employed in making chicken fried steak. Tender cuts like chicken breasts, beef filet, pork loin, and so on don't need any tenderization. THey may be pounded to reshape them, but there is no real requirement. Tough cuts, typically beef, may be physically pounded or subjected to the tender mercies of the jacquard tenderizer in order to render them easier to eat and more succulent when they are being used for a rapid cooking method like chicken fried steak.

If they are being used in a low and slow method, like braising or barbecuing, there is no point and the many small holes would be a detriment as they would allow more moisture to be expressed. Firstly, neither brining nor marinating tenderize, ever, unless there is acid or an active enzymatic ingredient in the marinade to do it.

Braising and other low and slow methods work by converting the connective tissue protein collagen into gelatin, thus making the cut succulent and tender, despite being very well done.

IF you are going to do this, there simply is no point in mechanical tenderization. Enzymatic tenderization works by denaturing the proteins in the meat, and if over done will turn them to mush. It also works only at the surface, unless left long enough to penetrate--but then the surface will mushy. Using a jacquard might be helpful in getting an enzymatic marindate to penetrate and act on some of the interior of the cut, but I personally do not like the outcome from enzymatic treatments, and never use them.

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