What Einstein Told His Cook (17 page)

WHEN NOBODY’S WATCHING…

Why do people say that the meat nearest the bone is always the sweetest?

W
e can take that remark with a grain of…sugar, because the word
sweet
is both overused and misused in gastronomic parlance. It is often used just to mean pleasant tasting and not meant to be taken literally. Perhaps that’s because, of the fundamental tastes that have been identified in humans, sweetness is the one that seems to give us the most pleasure.

Nevertheless, the meat nearest the bone really is tastier for several reasons.

First, because it’s buried down inside the meat, the bone and its surroundings don’t get as hot and cook as fast as the outer parts do. When you grill a T-bone steak, for example, the meat near the bone ends up rarer than the rest, and the rarer the meat, the juicier and more flavorful it is.

Another effect arises from the abundance of tendons and other connective tissue that anchor the meat to the bone. The collagen protein in these tissues breaks down when heated and turns into gelatin, a much softer protein. Gelatin has the further property of being able to hold huge amounts of water, up to ten times its own bulk. So in general, wherever there is the most collagen—and that’s usually next to the bone—the meat will be both more tender and juicier.

A third meat-near-the-bone effect is more obvious. In certain cuts, notably in ribs and chops, there is a lot of fat near the bone. So when no one’s looking and you’re gnawing away like Henry VIII at one of those bones, you can’t help but get a large dose of fat. And much to our regret and that of our arteries, highly saturated animal fat is delicious.

THERMOMETRY GEOMETRY

Cookbooks caution that when I use a meat thermometer to test the done-ness of a roast, I should never let it touch the bone. Nowhere have I seen an explanation of why. Does the roast explode or something?

I
hate warnings without reasons, don’t you? All they do is dispense anxiety without information. Whenever I see an “open other end” warning on a box, I open the wrong end just to see what will happen. I’m still alive.

Bone is a lesser conductor of heat than meat is. For one thing, bone is porous, and the air cells are heat insulators. Also, bones are relatively dry, and much of the heat transfer through a roast is due to the water in the meat. So when most of the meat has reached a certain temperature, it’s likely that the regions surrounding the bones will still be relatively cool. They will make the thermometer read too low and fool you into overcooking your chicken, turkey, or roast.

ODE ON A GREASY URN

When I make a meaty stock, soup, or stew, it winds up with an oil slick on top: fat melted from the meat. I want to skim it off, but it’s messy and I can never get all of it. Is there an easy way?

R
ecipes tell you to “skim the fat” from soups and stews as if it were as easy as peeling a banana. Supposedly, you just grab a spoon and scoop off the layer of fat without removing any of the underlying solids or liquids. But the word
skim
is a scam.

For one thing, it’s hard to know how deeply to scoop without removing a lot of the underlying liquid. If the pot or pan is wide, the fat may be spread out into such a thin layer that you can’t remove it with a spoon. Moreover, there are probably lumps of meat and vegetables sticking up through the surface that impede your scavenging. And finally, there can still be a lot of fat hiding down among the solids.

If there’s not too much liquid in the pot, you can pour it all into a gravy separator—one of those glass or plastic cups that look like miniature watering cans and dispense their contents from the bottom, like a crooked card dealer. The watery liquid flows out, leaving the top layer of fat behind.

Or, you can strain the liquids into a tall, narrow, heatproof glass container, so that the fat layer becomes deeper and can be sucked off the top with a rubber-bulb turkey baster.

The most tempting method is to put the whole pot in the refrigerator, so that the fat layer will solidify and you can then lift it off in pieces like ice from a frozen pond. But that’s dangerous, because the pot can heat the contents of your fridge to a bacteria-friendly temperature. Cool hot foods in several small containers before refrigerating them.

A wonderfully quick and easy method involves a midget-size mop—yes, a mop—that literally mops up the fat. You swish it across the surface of your stock (or soup or stew) and it selectively soaks up the oil without absorbing the watery liquid. It goes by various unappetizing brand names, including Oil Mop, Fat Mop, and Grease Mop, and is available at kitchenware stores.

How, you may ask, can a mop distinguish between oily and watery liquids?

An ordinary mop absorbs water because the water wets—that is, sticks to—the fibers of the mop. There is an attraction between the water’s molecules and the molecules of the cotton, or whatever the mop fibers are made of. Moreover, water will even climb up between the fibers by capillary attraction. Thus, when you dip an ordinary mop into water and withdraw it, a lot of water comes along with it.

But water doesn’t wet all substances, by a long shot; its molecules just have too little attraction to certain other molecules. Dip a candle into water, for instance, and it will come out dry. Water won’t stick to wax or to many plastics, but—and here’s the thing—oils will. The Grease Mop is made of a plastic that is wetted by oil but not by water. It therefore sucks out only the oil.

Now that your mop is loaded with oil, and it can hold only so much per swish, how do you dispose of that oil before the next swish?

You can hold the mop under hot water and let the oil go down the drain, but it may eventually find a cool spot and solidify, clogging the pipes beyond the reach of any plumber, short of tearing the house down. Alternatively, you can step out the back door and flick the mop smartly. A little shower of oil won’t hurt the grass, and it’s biodegradable. The ants will even thank you for it. Then, back to the kitchen to swish and flick again, until all the fat is gone from your pot.

A fat mop or grease mop.

A HAM EXAM

Ever since I moved to Virginia, I’ve been perplexed by the fact that “Virginia hams” are never refrigerated, but are sold off-the-shelf at roadside stands and in supermarkets. What keeps them from spoiling?

T
hey don’t spoil because they’re “cured,” which is a catch-all term for any process that inhibits bacterial growth, even at room temperature. But hams can be bewildering. How are they cured? Are all hams salted? Smoked? Do you have to soak them? Cook them?

There is no single set of answers to these questions because there are so many different kinds of ham, prepared in so many different ways. Few challenges to humankind seem to have evoked as much resourcefulness as how to eat the hind end of a hog.

In terms of cuts, you can find whole hams, half (shank end or butt end) hams, skin-on or skinless hams, and rolled and tied hams, not to mention bone-in, boneless, and the artlessly oxymoronic “semi-boneless” hams. (“Semi-boned” might be a tad more logical because in butcherese, “boned” actually means boneless!)

And then there are hams named not for the surgical procedures they have endured, but for their styles or places of production. Every region and culture outside of Israel and Islam seems to have its own ways of dealing with a hog’s butt. Some of the best-known regional hams come from England, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Spain. And in the United States there are highly acclaimed hams from Kentucky, Vermont, Georgia, North Carolina, and…yes, Virginia. (I’ve always wanted to write “Yes, Virginia” in answer to a question.)

Now please don’t write to tell me that I’ve left out “the best hams in the world.” I do not argue politics, religion, or hams.

What classifies these many products under the common heading of “ham” is that they are all hogs’ hind legs, treated—except for “fresh” ham, which is untreated—by one or more of five processes: salting, smoking, drying, spicing, and aging. There are almost as many different hams as there are combinations and permutations of these five procedures, except that salting is the one step common to all and is often called “curing” all by itself.

Salting, smoking, and drying all contribute to killing food-spoiling bacteria. Here’s how they do it.

SALTING

MEATS HAVE BEEN
preserved with salt for thousands of years. Salt preserves food because it kills or deactivates bacteria by osmosis.

A bacterium is essentially a blob of protoplasm inside a cell membrane, like a pillowcase full of Jell-O. The protoplasm contains water with dissolved stuff—proteins, carbohydrates, salts, and a lot of other chemicals that are of vital interest to the bacterium but of no concern to us at the moment.

Now let’s douse an unlucky bacterium in very salty water, so that there is a stronger, saltier environment outside its cell membrane than inside. Whenever there exists such an imbalance on opposite sides of a water-permeable barrier (the cell membrane), Mother Nature, who hates imbalances, tries to restore the balance. In this case she does it by forcing water out of the less-concentrated side (the bacterium’s guts) and into the more concentrated side (the external salt water). The effect is to diminish the imbalance by making the strong solution weaker and the weak solution stronger. The unfortunate consequences for the bacterium are that it loses water, shrivels up, and dies. At the very least, it’s no longer a threat to us because it is discouraged from reproducing. (“Not tonight, Dear; I’m dehydrated.”)

This spontaneous movement of water through a membrane, driven by an imbalance of concentration between the solutions on either side, is called osmosis. It comes into play also in the brining of meats to improve their flavor and cooking properties (see page 143).

And by the way, a strong solution of sugar in water can have the same effect as strong salt water. That’s why we can use lots of sugar to preserve fruits and berries to make, well, preserves. In principle, you could just as well make your strawberry jam with salt instead of sugar. Just don’t invite me to breakfast.

These days, hams and other pork products may be cured with salt mixed with additional substances, including sugar (“sugar-cured hams”), seasonings, and sodium nitrite. Nitrites do three things: They inhibit the growth of
Clostridium botulinum
bacteria, the notorious source of botulin poison; they contribute flavor; and they react with myoglobin, the red color in fresh meat, to form a chemical called nitric oxide myoglobin, which turns the meat a bright pink color during the slow heating used in the curing process.

In the stomach, nitrites are converted to nitrosamines, which are cancer-producing chemicals. The FDA therefore places a limit on the amount of residual nitrite that can be present in cured meat products.

SMOKING

CURING A HAM DOESN’T
cook it, so it usually has to be dealt with further. Smoking it over a wood fire also kills germs, partly because it dries out the meat, partly because it’s a sort of low-temperature cooking, and partly because the smoke contains evil chemicals. (You don’t want to know.) But it can also give the meat a wonderful range of flavors, depending on the type of wood, the temperature, the length of time, and so on.

Generally, hams that have been smoked, and that’s most of them, need not be cooked any further before eating. Supermarket hams may be either partially or fully cooked. Ask the butcher or check the label, which will say something like “cooked” or “ready to eat” or “cook before serving.”

To answer your question, then: Virginia hams, including the renowned Smithfields, have been thoroughly cured by both salting and smoking, so they don’t need to be refrigerated or cooked. But that doesn’t stop many people from soaking, simmering, roasting, glazing, and generally fussing over them once they get them home.

DRYING

LONG PERIODS OF
hanging in dry air can also do the job of dehydrating and killing bacteria. Italian
prosciutto
and Spanish
serrano
are cured with dry salt and then dried by hanging, traditionally in wind-blown caves or attics. Not having been hot-smoked, they are still technically raw and are eaten that way, sliced paper-thin. There’s nothing wrong with eating bacteria-free raw meat.

SPICING AND AGING

THIS IS WHERE
real individuality comes into the picture. Hams can be coated with salt, pepper, sugar, and various secret concoctions of spices, and then aged for years. If cured and dried, they won’t spoil from bacteria, but with age they may develop coatings of mold that must be scrubbed off before eating. So-called country hams are often in this category. The mold may look awful, but the meat inside can be superb. Again, there’s no harm in eating it.