Day twenty seven

A courtesy of

Myths about cooking meat. Do you know any?

Today we have our third lecture on Culinary Science. The topic was quite broad - Animals and Plants. As we were at the beginning, it's easy to cover animals in one hour, but to cover different plants in one hour is not feasible.

What was really interesting is speaking about some myths regarding cooking meat. The first one is that marinating meat will tenderize it. This is not true. Marinating meat will introduce additional flavor to your meat and also will create filling that it's has additional moisture. During usually recommended marinating time (24 hours for meat) the liquid will not be able to penetrate and break fiber.

Another myth is about resting meat after cooking. Many people believe that if you rest meat after cooking all juices are going to be absorbed back by the piece of meat. The actual thing is
that these juices are not going to be absorbed back. What happened during the cooking is that juices left cells and left between fiber. During resting time moisture (juice) cool down a bit and stay there. These juices may be released by applying pressure, therefor it's important that your knife is really sharp.

Interesting point was made about gluten and how it works. The gluten is a combination of two proteins - gliadin and glutenin. When dough is mixed gluten is formed as a specific molecular structure (what is called gluten development). However, when we say gluten intolerance, this is not quite accurate, because some dishes have no gluten. These dishes can have flour (for example sauces where flour used as a thickening agent, or beef stew when you drench meat in flour and then cook it) and still be dangerous for people with 'gluten' intolerance. What it's actually mean that people are sensitive to either gliadin or glutenin. Also I believe that for these people it does not really matter which of these two proteins causes the problem...

Today was my first day of working. I started to work as Student Teaching Assistant in the Teaching Kitchen. Everything was great. I afraid that our task will be cleaning and arranging things in the kitchen. Fortunate, our task was cooking dinner for students in addition to the food prepared by two classes (today it was Asian cuisine and Chinese cuisine). At the beginning I was assigned to separate two boxes of cauliflowers into small florets. I thought ok, this will be fast. Sure, it took me almost two hours. But cooking it was much faster then I thought, we steamed it (5 min per tray and there were five trays). Then I was cutting, washing and spinning lettuce. The salad spinner was something like 20 liters size! It was huge. So yes, that was great to work in the kitchen.

Tomorrow is the Culinary Fundamentals - we are in the kitchen again!