Time and a gentle heat leads to a meaty heaven.

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Anyone living in a modern developed country is experiencing a degree of luxury historically only experienced by kings, emperors and other members of the aristocracy.

If you don’t believe me, think about buying a steak from the supermarket.

Today anyone can walk into a supermarket and walk out with a tenderloin or two. Freshly butchered and conveniently packaged.

The thing is though, tenderloins don’t run around in fields, cows run around in fields. Cows weigh about 500 kg, only 2 kg of which is tenderloin. Where, exactly, is the rest of the cow?

We don’t have to worry about that 498 kg question.

In days gone by if you wanted a steak it came with a side of the rest of the cow. Very, very few people could afford to throw this away.

True, beef was often out of reach for most people. But even with staples like lamb and pork the basic problem remained. Who could afford to waste any part of an animal?

You had to find a way to use the bits that weren’t as desirable as the tenderloin, porterhouse and ribeye.

One of my first posts was about how to cook steak and you can think of that as a post about cooking the expensive cuts.

This post is about the tough cuts: the briskets, the chucks and the shanks. The cuts you can’t just throw on the grill. The cuts that need patience, skill and knowledge to turn into something delicious.

It’s the story of the cuts that have always fed the masses. The cheap cuts. The cuts the rich didn’t want.

Well, the cuts that were, until recently, cheaper; before foodies and middle-aged men with a smoker re-discovered the delights of some slow cooked meat.

What Makes Meat Tough?

The simple answer is work. When a muscle is worked it becomes tough.

One way that it does this is by increasing the amount of myosin and actin that are packed into the muscle fibres, the cells that make up our muscles.

Continued microscopic injury to muscle fibres stimulates the production of proteins, that over time, make the muscle fibre grow larger. This is what you are trying to do in the gym. This is why your muscles grow when you work out.

The other thing that happens when you work a muscle is that the amount of connective tissue that holds the muscle together increases.

Connective tissue is predominantly made of a protein called collagen. This protein is a very tough and most of the art of cooking tough meats comes down to dealing with the collagen in connective tissue.

But, Cows Don’t Go To the Gym?

No cows don’t go to the gym. But some of their muscles do a lot of work anyway.

The average cow weighs about half a tonne and about 60% of this, about 300 kg, is supported by its chest muscles, the remaining weight being supported by its hind legs.

So even if a cow is just standing in a field, its chest, front legs and hind legs are still hard at work. Let alone when it is moving its half a tonne of bulk around.

Keeping this in mind, a useful rule of thumb is that the tenderest parts of the cow are in the centre top around the loin and rib area. That is, the areas that aren’t directly involved in bearing all that weight.

As you move away from this area the meat will get tougher. If you go down, you hit the plate and brisket. If you go forwards you get chuck and if you move rearwards, you get the round. All tougher cuts of beef.

Two Steps to Tender Meat: Muscle Fibers and Collagen

So in any cut of meat we are going to be dealing with two sources of toughness: the muscles fibres and the connective tissue.

The easiest one to deal with is the muscle fibres.

Slice Against the Grain

If you have a piece of meat with long, large muscle fibres the easiest way to deal with them is with your knife, not your teeth.

If you slice your meat against the grain, that is across the fibres, you’ll cut them into smaller segments that will no longer need to be sheared through while chewing.

It can be a little challenging identifying the grain, especially as it can change direction halfway along a cut, but the more you do it the easier it becomes (there’s a good resource here if you want to know more).

It’s also sometimes easier to see the fibres when the meat is raw so it’s worth checking early if you are going to be carving after cooking

Convert Collagen into Gelatin

If muscle fibres can be dealt with easily enough, connective tissue is a much harder problem.

The worst type of connective tissue is the epimysium (see the muscle figure above). Often called silverskin, this connective tissue surrounds entire muscles.

It’s made predominantly of the protein elastin, a very stable protein that won’t melt no matter how long you cook the meat. You should strip this off before cooking.

The perimysium, which surrounds bundles of muscle fibres, and the endomysium, which surrounds individual muscle fibres, are the other sources of connective tissue.

Luckily, though, these are made predominantly of collagen, a tough protein for sure, but one that we can deal with. Because, when collagen is heated it partially breaks down into what is known as gelatin. Gelatin is able to act a bit like a starch. It forms a network that traps water, forming a gel.

So, when we breakdown collagen from the connective tissue we’re not only getting rid of a tough protein but we’re also creating a protein network that helps keep water in the meat.

This makes the meat juicy, or succulent.

The Physics of “Low and Slow” Cooking

So, if we’re cooking our meat anyway and collagen breaks down when heated, whats the problem?

Well, the problem is that collagen breaks down at a relatively high temperature, around 71$\degree$C. But we already know that meat is well done and dry between 70$\degree$C-75$\degree$C, because the muscle fibres have contracted and squeezed out the moisture.

How do breakdown all our collagen without drying out the meat?

The answer is a gentle temperature gradient. When we heat a piece of meat we establish a temperature gradient from the outside of the meat to the centre. The gentler this gradient the better.

If we cook at low temperature the centre will reach it’s target temperature slowly but the rest of the meat will also be at a lower temperature.

If the centre of the meat is at 80$\degree$C we don’t want the outside to be 100$\degree$C we want it as close to 80$\degree$C as we can get it.

If we use a gentle temperature gradient for a long time less of the meat will have been exposed to high temperatures while most of it will still have experienced temperatures high enough to break down collagen.

This is the basic idea behind ‘low and slow’ cooking.

Braising vs. Stewing: Temperatures and Technique

So we have a piece of brisket, silverside or oxtail for dinner. How are we going to cook it?

I’m going to leave smoking for another post and look at cooking in some type of liquid. So, braising, using a whole cut of partially submerged meat, and stewing, where the meat is cut up into smaller chunks and fully submerged.

For both stewing and braising the golden rules are to brown the meat before beginning to get some Maillard reactions. Then to keep the temperature of the fluid as low as possible i.e. maintain a low temperature gradient.

If cooking in the oven this means that you should crack the lid a bit.

Even with the oven set as low as 160$\degree$C having the lid on means that it will come to the boil eventually, so you want to get some evaporation happening to cool down the liquid and keep the temperature gradient gentle.

To keep the lid on or not?

There seems to be a bit of internet controversy over whether the lid should be on or not when stewing or braising in an oven.

Most of the advice seems to revolve around the consistency of the finished sauce.

My thinking is that you can always add more liquid if it is too thick or take the meat out of the sauce at the end and boil it down a bit if it is too thin.

It’s better to concentrate on the meat then sort out the sauce rather than trying to do both at once.

Harold McGee has worked it all out. He recommends cooking your stew or braise in the oven with the lid cracked and the temperature set to 95$\degree$C. This will slowly bring the temperature of your dish up to 50$\degree$C over about two hours.

After this crank it up to 120$\degree$C, so the stew slowly comes up to 80$\degree$C or so and let it cook for another hour.

This approach reflects what we discussed above, a slow gentle heat that will denature muscle fibres and then just enough time above 70$\degree$C to ensure collagen breakdown and gelatin production.

You can also do this on the hob as well but it’s a little harder to control your temperatures. You’ll need to keep a closer eye on proceedings.

Feature	Braising	Stewing
Meat Cut Size	Large, whole cuts (e.g., brisket, pot roast, shank)	Small, uniform bite-sized cubes (e.g., chuck, ox cheek)
Liquid Level	Partially submerged (1/3 to 1/2 of the meat)	Fully submerged in cooking liquid
Ideal Muscle Cuts	Brisket, Pork Shoulder, Lamb Shanks	Beef Chuck, Ox Cheek, Stew Meat
Lid Technique	Cracked lid to allow evaporative cooling	Cracked lid (oven) or simmer low on cooktop

Conclusion

Do we need to be as precise as Harold McGee? Looking at recipes online most of them are cooked at 180$\degree$C often with the lid on, so clearly that works for most people; it’s certainly easier.

There are also a ton of variables, you may want to add vegetables at some stage which will cool down the stewing liquid, every oven is different when it comes to temperature control and every cut of meat is different in the amount of collagen and the size of its muscle fibres.

But I also suspect there is some dry meat in braises and stews around the world. There certainly is when I do it this way.

But now I know I’m sure my next goulash will finally be worthy of the name.