Day sixty one

Today's food - buffet style

Do we need 'to rest' meat after grilling? And other secrets of successful grilling.

The day before practical exam for the first semester. I was about grilling. Our menu was: Grilled Beef NY Steak, compound butter and sauce Bearnaise, French Fries, Grilled Vegetables Provencial Style.

Let's start from the basics. There are a few techniques quite similar to each other - grilling, broiling, griddling, and BBQ. They are all similar because they are an examples of dry heat cooking. Grilling is when you have source of heat under you food item. The BBQ is a way of grilling. Technically BBQ is done
using charcoal. Broiling is technique when you have source of heat above your food item. Griddling is done on the griddle which is flat surface usually with marks, so you cook a food item using heat source under your griddle.

With grilling there are many believes and theories regarding how to cook a piece of meat. I am not going to give you one method and say that this is only one is right. I am open for discussion.

Once I hear that you should not season your meat until you ready to cook it, because salt is going to dry surface of meat and the final product will be dry. I will not follow this advice, because of a few reasons. First, grilling is a dry heat method, therefore you want your meat to be dry when you place it on the fire. The drier product, the faster it will start cooking, it does not require heat to evaporate moisture on the surface first, therefore caramelization on the surface (Maylard reaction) occurs faster. Second, salt will help caramelize surface and the general rule is 'no color no flavor. Third and the last one, when you salt in advance, there will be opportunity for salt to penetrate product, therefore the taste will be even and not only on the surface.

What temperature you should cook your meat? It depends entirely on your taste. For medium done cook to 125-130 F and let it rest! Why we need to rest? You probably heard that resting will help to keep juice inside. That is kind of true, but how does it happen?  When you take a piece of meat from fire and put it to rest, there is opportunity for the protein to relax (during cooking it is in contraction), so protein relax and that allows to even temperature (when you cook it higher on the surface) and redistribute juices. What resting is also allows is to slightly firm up these juices therefore they are changing from runny to a little bit firmer stage.

We did today an experiment. Two pieces of meat was cooked for approximately the same temperature 120 F and 125 F. The first steak was resting for 10-12 minutes before it was cut. The second one was cut right away. What was really surprising for me, is that steak which rested visually was cooked more then the second one. The steak without resting seemed to be cook rare. We can explain this also as a result of carry-over cooking (and resting partially is a carry-over cooking), but we can not deny that resting is an important part of cooking meat.

Tomorrow is our practical exam. We have two menues and we will have two and a half hour to cook and then 20 minutes to serve food. It should be a good day.