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The Secret to Successful BBQ Pork Butt and Brisket is Science

posted by mrpg on Sunday September 09 2018, @05:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-god-isn't-real-how-come-meat-can-be-cooked? dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

[...] You've just encountered the bane of aspiring pit masters everywhere: the Stall (also known as the Zone or the Plateau), a common phenomenon in low-temperature cooking. What, precisely, causes the stall is a perennial topic of debate among BBQ enthusiasts. Is it a protein called collagen in the meat, which combines with water to convert to gelatin at the 160°F point? Or is it due to the fat rendering, turning lipids to liquid?

Several years ago, Greg Blonder, a Boston College professor, did the experiments and came up with a definitive answer: evaporative cooling. The meat sweats as it cooks, releasing the moisture within, and that moisture evaporates and cools the meat, effectively canceling out the heat from the BBQ. These days, Blonder is the resident science advisor and myth buster at the popular BBQ and grilling site called Amazing Ribs. "I spend a lot of my time settling bar fights, basically," he joked.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/let-science-be-your-guide-for-the-perfect-labor-day-bbq/

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @07:41PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @07:41PM (#732543)

    I've tried souis-vide with my own arduino controlled hotplate. Maybe I'll try it more in the future, but didn't notice anything earth shattering for the much larger time investment.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @04:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @04:13AM (#732656)

    The benefits are mainly:

    • low-temperature pasteurization allows combinations of gentle cooking and food safety that are otherwise not available, e.g. rare blade-tenderized steaks (or hamburger, if that's your thing) and pink pork
    • insensitivity to cooking time allows flexibility in meal times without over- or under-cooked food
    • uniform cooking throughout thick and/or varying cross-sections -- a steak sous-vided to medium, then seared in a skillet, is a juicy pink medium clear through (save only a thin crust), whereas other methods leave a gradient from well-done at the edges to medium in the center, with as little as half the volume actually cooked to the desired state.
    • temperature precision allows fine control of which proteins are denatured -- you can do weird things with eggs by tweaking the temperature a couple degrees

    Some of these benefits are more or less shared by other slow and/or low-temperature cooking methods, and they each apply in varying degree (or not at all) to various dishes.
    It's just another tool, not magic -- it can be used to good effect for many tasks, but "earth shattering" is unlikely, with the possible exception of a handful of dishes that specifically showcase sous-vide in one way or another.