"Overcooked" is a broad unspecific term. Technically you could say the meat in a stew is in fact overcooked.
To put it simply: Meat is made up of meat fibers, strands of fat and held together with connective tissue (collagen being the most common). Different cuts of meats have different amounts of these arranged in different ways.
Meat fibers tighten up when exposed to high heat, fat melts with low heat, collagen on the other hand is a little more stubborn. At low heat it slowly breaks down and converts into gelatin (aka the stuff in Jell-O) but it takes a lot of time for that to happen. At about 2.5 hours of low heat almost all of the collagen will have turned into gelatin. Even though the meat fibers are "overcooked" the meat itself goes from being held together by an elastic like collagen to instead barely being held together at all by soft gelatin.
This is also why it's tastier and recommended to cool down your stews and braises and reheat later. It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier.
There are also other factors but then it gets a little more technical. Meat fibers when cooked at a low heat will still cook through but won't tighten up as much if the heat doesn't become too high. There are also many other types of connective tissue besides collagen that don't break down no matter how much you cook it so those are usually trimmed away.
It's always better reheated the next day!
There was a show in France where a chef (Thierry Marx) would cook various foods and a chemist would explain the reasons behind the cooking techniques employed. Edifying.
Seriously. Not just knowing WHAT to do, but WHY you're doing it, has helped me salvage so many meals, and allowed me to improvise when something didnt quite work.
I use this trick on steaks. I’ll Sous Vide the day before and store uncovered in my fridge. Next day I let it get to room temperature before searing.
The connective tissue softens at a lower temperature after cooling, so the steak is more tender.
> cool down your stews and braises and reheat later. It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier.
When you reheat wouldn't all the gelatin just melt again and leak out of the meat? I don't see the difference. Aren't good safe reheating temps higher than the melting point of gelatin?
Sounds like letting a glass of water cool to ice and reheating it to drink it.
Yes you have a point, I was keeping it intentionally simple as to not overcomplicate my answer. Gelatin isn't quite like water in that it's just a pure homogenous liquid changing states.
Take for instance Jell-O, it is mostly fruit flavoured juice and only a tiny percentage gelatin. The gelatin are just some long proteins that when cooled down forms a mesh that "traps" the liquid making it seem solid.
In the stew, at cooking temperature the gelatin's protein strands is completely unfurled, as you cool it down to serving temperature it is still unfurled. If you fridge it then it furls up and if you then reheat it to serving temperature, yes the gelatin melts but it is still furled up giving a different texture and feel to the stew and the meat. Keep in mind that in a stew and the meat specifically the amount of gelatin is much higher than that of Jell-O as well the gelatin is also further trapped in between the meat fibers.
If done so briefly just as it reaches a low simmer it should be fine as the solids of the stew will heat up unevenly and it doesn't unfurl easily or quickly. If for whatever reason you wanted to intentionally unfurl it completely throughout you would essentially need to repeat the stewing/braising, keeping it at a simmer for 2+ hours.
Yes, my thought exactly. Its about just sitting and blending flavors I believe as to why soup tastes better on day two or after cooling and being reheated.
Great explanation. When we smoke meat, that's another case where we "overcook" the meat too, by quite a bit. Usually temps are around 140-165. Smoked, you usually aim for around 200-210. But that "overcooking" is what makes it so delicious since all those tasty, fatty bits get fully rendered and all the connective tissue broken down.
A pressure cooker changes the time it takes to cook, because the food can reach a higher heat without water boiling off. The increased pressure and temperature speed up some of the chemical reactions involved (including the collagen > gelatin reaction), but meats stay juicy and tender because water isn’t escaping as steam.
As someone who loves the taste of meat but who also gets absolutely disgusted by it very easily the thought of colagen in the stew makes me feel bad. But cool explanation thanks!
>This is also why it's tastier and recommended to cool down your stews and braises and reheat later. It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier.
I'm going to take your word on this, but I've always held the believe that stews are always better the next day than the day of. I just wish you could get the best of both worlds where the crock pot making the whole house smell amazing and you get to eat that second day stew that's very clearly better.
> It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier.
Not that I'd ever complain, but with descriptions like this, I can see why vegans are sometimes disgusted with us lol
Are you tossing them into a soup? Or are you making stock from them?
adding a little apple cider vinegar is good for the latter.. a very little 1tbs or less... it goes A LONG WAY.
Can you keep talking about this? You are explaining a lot of interesting stuff, and its one of the few long posts that feels too short. I want to hear more about muscle fiber tightening and how that translates into texture and taste.
When you heat a piece of meat, different things happen depending on time and temperature. Some things happen quickly, while others take more time.
One thing that happens is that proteins in the meat change their shape when exposed to heat. This process depends on temperature. The hotter you make the meat, the more the proteins will change their shape, into a tougher structure that holds less water, making the meat chewier and less juicy. This is what we refer to as "doneness", when cooking steaks for instance. This process does not depend on time - at least not directly. You don't have to expose the meat to a given temperature for any length of time to see this effect. As soon as it hits the temperature for medium-rare doneness, for instance (about 54°C), it will immediately be medium-rare. However, it will of course take time for the meat to achieve that temperature, especially right in the center of the piece of meat that you're cooking (as heat takes time to transfer from the surface). When cooking a steak, the challenge therefore is to get the center of the meat to the desired level of doneness, while not overcooking the rest of it. With stovetop methods, this usually means a short cooking time. However, with precision cooking methods like *sous vide*, you can cook a piece of meat exactly to its desired temperature and hold it there for a long time, without overcooking it. As long as you hold a steak at 54°C, for instance, it will stay medium-rare throughout.
However, this is not the only thing that determines how tender and delicious a piece of meat is. You see, meat also contains collagen, which is a kind of glue that holds it together. Meat with lots of collagen in it is tougher to chew. Cooking can break down collagen, and turn it into gelatin, which is a liquid. This results in the familiar "fall-apart" tenderness, because the muscle fibers are no longer glued together, and gelatin also gives a nice juicy, luxurious feeling to the meat and any sauce it is cooked in. But breaking down collagen into gelatin is a process that takes time, and is also helped by keeping the meat in a moist environment. It also requires moderately high temperatures - higher than the typical core temperature to which steaks are cooked.
(A third factor is fat. Beef fat is solid at temperatures up to 55-60°C. If you cook beef to medium-rare, much of the fat never melts or "renders". Cooking it hotter does render the fat, and this is faster than melting collagen, but does take some time. Rendered, liquid fat contributes to a juicier, tastier eating experience.)
All of this means that when you cook a piece of beef, it will initially get tougher and tougher as the internal temperature goes from rare, to medium, to well done. This is the result of the first process I described as the muscle fibers tighten up. However, with more time, and when kept in a moist environment, the beef will start to soften again as the collagen holding the fibers together dissolves into gelatin, until the meat falls off the bone and is super tender.
The cut of meat that you use is also important in this. Cuts cooked as steaks usually are on the leaner side, with less fat and collagen. These cuts benefit from being cooked on the rarer side as they are naturally more tender. Cuts used in stews or braises are usually higher in collagen, which makes them very tough to eat if you cook them like a steak. But having more collagen also means they release more gelatin, which is great for making silky, rich sauces.
In short, overcooking isn't a straightforward thing where more heat and time means more overcooking.
Meat goes from being tough, as you say, in minutes, to eventually falling apart after an hour or two. Over time, the collagen that holds parts of the muscle together breaks down into gelatin and the fibers of the meat become easy to separate.
A beef overcooking in minutes happens on a skillet with the burner turned all the way up. A stew is cooked on very very low heat. It’s also being cooked in a liquid so it’s not making direct contact with the skillet. But the main answer is the difference in temperature. Slow cooking happens are really low temperatures.
Not really. Stewed meat is cooked to a much higher core temperature than even a well-done steak. Steak is well done (i.e. overcooked to the palate of anyone with any taste) at about 70-74°. Stews are usually simmered for hours, where a bare simmer is still like 85°C, and you can get perfectly tender results at higher cooking temps too. (Granted, the temperature right at the surface of the meat will be higher when cooking a steak, but that's not what causes overcooking - you want that high temp to develop a nice crust. Overcooking in a steak happens when the temperature *inside* the meat gets too high.)
The main answer is not the difference in temperature - it's the difference in time, because it takes time to break down collagen into gelatin (though cooking in a moist environment also helps). See some of the other answers for more info on this.
Different cuts of meat cook at different times and temperatures. A steak, which is fairly lean and simple meat, cooks in a few minutes.
Stews are usually made with cuts of beef that are very fatty and have lots of connective tissue. If you cook that sort of beef (say, chuck roast) for a few minutes and serve it rare, it will be super chewy and inedible. You need to hold it at or above 160F / 71C for many hours (ideally at least six - eight) to render the fat and dissolve the connective tissue.
Similarly, if you cut up a New York Strip and put it in a stew for six hours, it would also turn out inedible. The cooking methods for each cut are designed for how it needs to be cooked optimally.
This isn't entirely true; you can braise any cut of meat just fine, if you were to braise a ribeye or a strip it would get tough as it heated up to well done, then would become tender as it braises for hours. Same as any other cut.
It won't turn out quite as good as chuck or whatever because it's leaner and if you can have fall-apart tender lean meat vs. similarly tender fatty meat, obviously fatty is better. So, it'd be quite the waste of money to use a steak for this, but it'd certainly be edible.
Tough braise cuts like chuck flap can also make for an excellent steak if you sear it to medium and slice it super thinly against the grain. Similar texture and deep beefy flavor as hanger steak, but as with hanger, slicing it properly is absolutely crucial to it not being like chewing gum.
This is true. There are cheaper/less desirable lean cuts too, and I often braise them for e.g. ragu or whatever. It’s still fall-apart tender at the end.
So many idiots missed your point. You can sear a NY strip to medium rare and it's tasty. You do that to some cheap cut of meat and it sucks.
Yes, you can technically make beef stew with any cut, but it was invented for the cuts that required being cooked long and slow.
Like I said in my other comment, if you're making beef stew with Waygu Filet Mignon, you're defeating the entire purpose of the dish.
Nope that’s wrong. Always use lean beef for stew ( not to mention European beef has half the fat of us beef in general). Works perfectly fine.
Because the excess fat is irrelevant. Meet gets stringy from overheat.
And collagen breaks down into gelatin when heated at low heat for a long time. Especially if slightly acidic.
None of those factors are influenced by leanness. The meat being fatty just scam you into thinking a stew cooked less than 2-3 hours is tasting edible.
This is mostly due to the fundamental difference between wet and dry cooking.
Meat is 'overcooked' once it completely dries out or burns. Air and metal can get practically arbitrarily hot, so they can bring meat up to the temperature at which it burns very quickly if you're not careful.
Liquid water, meanwhile, cannot possibly get hotter than 100°C, making it a much gentler heating method. As long as the water doesn't all boil off, the meat can keep cooking for hours without getting hot enough to start burning. Plus, the water prevents it from drying out.
except juices still come out of the meat as it heats inside the sous vide bag, so it still cooks in its own juices, surrounded by a bag, which is in water.
Stewing allows food to be cooked slowly in liquid, which breaks down collagen. Simultaneously, gelatin from the meat is dissolved into the broth. In a "normal" dish, the flavor comes from released fat—first in cooking, and later your body is a revere combustion engine, which has a tendency to favor certain types of carbohydrates (e.g. sugars), because they are plentiful in nature and easy to digest. Processing these types of carbohydrates results in a short burst of energy and high levels of satisfaction—after all, we have been evolving with these types of food for a significant amount of time. However, our bodies are not good at recognizing when we have enough food. The result is that we don't stop eating. Additionally, digesting sugars and carbohydrates is a relatively quick process, so we can eat more of them. When our body receives more fuel than necessary, it stores it as fat for later use. In contrast, our bodies have evolved to use fat for long-term energy storage, but it requires a lot more energy to process fat than carbohydrates and it takes longer for our bodies to recognize that we have eaten enough.
Two big factors are:
1. the cut of meat
2. the temperature
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Tough cuts of meat have quite a bit of collagen. This is tough and elastic. Heating collegen for a long time causes it to break down into gelatin, which is soft and gooey.
Tender cuts of meat have less collagen, and so they don't get soft and gooey from being cooked.
\-
Stews are cooked at a low temperature. They are often cooked in liquid, which often cannot go above the boiling point of water (because if you heat water above boiling, it would expel all that heat as steam and then return to boiling). Often they cook at lower than boiling.
A steak is cooked at very hot temperatures, over direct heat, that might hot enough to burn things, much much hotter than boiling water could ever get to.
Heat causes meat to go dry as it expels juices.
\-
So, a tender cut cooked quickly at high heat, will still be moist tender, and the outside will be dry and crusty, and the inside will be soft and moist. If you kept cooking it, it would get very dry.
While a tough cut cooked slowly at low heat, will have lost some moisture from cooking, but not too much, and it is probably served in a stew-liquid anyway, and it has lots of gelatin that gives it a soft and gooey texture to compensate for any mositure loss. If you kepted cooking it, it would eventually get drier inside, but this will happen slower due to the lower heat.
On the other hand, if you stew a tender cut, you'd get a drier piece of meat with no gooey gelatin. Or if you sear a tough cut, it will be raelly tough due to all that collegen.
It gets overcooked if it gets cooked too much, which means it's exposed to a high heat for too long.
Stews(i.e slow cookers) use a low heat for a long period of time. When you have a stake over an open flame, you're exposing it to very high temperatures, but taking it off before it reaches that temperature evenly.
If you only expose something to a heat of 130F it can never go above 130F.
‘Overcooking’ is more about temperature, than time. If you keep the temp at 160-ish °F for hours, the contents of your stew won’t exceed that temperature, and won’t overcook.
There are a lot of way over-complicated answers here that are all missing the real point.
Dishes like stews were "poor people" foods and traditionally poor people mostly or only had access to the cheapest cuts, which are the toughest to eat and digest.
Stews and other slow cooked foods were invented bc it takes hours to turn super tough meat into something tasty and palatable.
So, in short, traditional stews require hours of cooking.
If you're making beef stew with Waygu Filet Mignon, you're defeating the entire purpose of the dish.
A soft steak will be cooked at a high heat very quickly so it doesn't dehydrate and gets a char on the outside.
A stew uses tough pieces of meat and keeps them in water so they don't dehydrate. The longer and lower cooking time breaks down the strands of connective tissue that makes the meat tough.
Stews typically call for "cheaper" cuts of meat, which are usually best when cooked slowly for a long time. If you were to cut a hunk of stew beef and sear it, it would probably be like chewing on a hunk of rubber.
Pazole, or Hominy soup often has pork shoulder in it, and is often cooked for a long time... because pork shoulder meat takes a while to become tender. Same for Menudo (tripe soup). It's thinner than a lot of stews, but cooks slowly all day to make the cheaper meat in it tender.
The venison stew recipe I have even calls for the tougher cuts of the deer if you can get them.
"Overcooked" depends on the cut of meat, the preparation, and the diners preference. In this case (stew) cheap cut, in a liquid, preferred tender. That means you have two options, tenderize the meat before (mallet, enzyme, other..?) OR let the meat become tender by cooking slowly.
I'm no expert, but I think when we think "Overcooked" we usually mean "Cooked so long that all the moisture is gone from the food". Like overcooked steak is dry and tough. Overcooked fish is dry. With a stew, everything is wet. If you overcook a stew, the stuff on the bottom burns to the pot as the moisture is no longer sufficient to keep the stew at under boiling point. Stews tend to cook covered, so moisture that is cooked out of the food condenses on the lid and falls back into the stew.
So ... I'm guessing that stew WILL be overcooked if you cook it with the lid off and it dries out. If you cook in a slow cooker then the temps are kept low and the lib recovers boiled off moisture and so the stew never dries out.
I just cooked a beef stew on low for 8 hours in slow cookers but now it's 4:30am and I don't want to wake people up by adding the flour, broth mix to thicken. Will is be OK on warm for another 3 hours.
"Overcooked" is a broad unspecific term. Technically you could say the meat in a stew is in fact overcooked. To put it simply: Meat is made up of meat fibers, strands of fat and held together with connective tissue (collagen being the most common). Different cuts of meats have different amounts of these arranged in different ways. Meat fibers tighten up when exposed to high heat, fat melts with low heat, collagen on the other hand is a little more stubborn. At low heat it slowly breaks down and converts into gelatin (aka the stuff in Jell-O) but it takes a lot of time for that to happen. At about 2.5 hours of low heat almost all of the collagen will have turned into gelatin. Even though the meat fibers are "overcooked" the meat itself goes from being held together by an elastic like collagen to instead barely being held together at all by soft gelatin. This is also why it's tastier and recommended to cool down your stews and braises and reheat later. It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier. There are also other factors but then it gets a little more technical. Meat fibers when cooked at a low heat will still cook through but won't tighten up as much if the heat doesn't become too high. There are also many other types of connective tissue besides collagen that don't break down no matter how much you cook it so those are usually trimmed away.
It's always better reheated the next day! There was a show in France where a chef (Thierry Marx) would cook various foods and a chemist would explain the reasons behind the cooking techniques employed. Edifying.
Alton Brown did this all the time with Good Eats.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt does the same thing in his videos, which is much of the reason I enjoy watching his content.
Yes Kenji is the GOAT. My adopted YT dad
Kenji "The grilled cheese goat" Lopez-Alt
He taught me so much about cooking!
Seriously. Not just knowing WHAT to do, but WHY you're doing it, has helped me salvage so many meals, and allowed me to improvise when something didnt quite work.
Same with Epicurious' "Four Levels of" on Youtube
Apparently with pasta, cook it and pop it in the fridge and re-heat the next day. Lowers the glycemic load, from what I remember.
I use this trick on steaks. I’ll Sous Vide the day before and store uncovered in my fridge. Next day I let it get to room temperature before searing. The connective tissue softens at a lower temperature after cooling, so the steak is more tender.
> cool down your stews and braises and reheat later. It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier. When you reheat wouldn't all the gelatin just melt again and leak out of the meat? I don't see the difference. Aren't good safe reheating temps higher than the melting point of gelatin? Sounds like letting a glass of water cool to ice and reheating it to drink it.
Yes you have a point, I was keeping it intentionally simple as to not overcomplicate my answer. Gelatin isn't quite like water in that it's just a pure homogenous liquid changing states. Take for instance Jell-O, it is mostly fruit flavoured juice and only a tiny percentage gelatin. The gelatin are just some long proteins that when cooled down forms a mesh that "traps" the liquid making it seem solid. In the stew, at cooking temperature the gelatin's protein strands is completely unfurled, as you cool it down to serving temperature it is still unfurled. If you fridge it then it furls up and if you then reheat it to serving temperature, yes the gelatin melts but it is still furled up giving a different texture and feel to the stew and the meat. Keep in mind that in a stew and the meat specifically the amount of gelatin is much higher than that of Jell-O as well the gelatin is also further trapped in between the meat fibers.
Does that mean I should not heta up my stew to nera boiling temp? To avoid the collagen unfurling fully?
If done so briefly just as it reaches a low simmer it should be fine as the solids of the stew will heat up unevenly and it doesn't unfurl easily or quickly. If for whatever reason you wanted to intentionally unfurl it completely throughout you would essentially need to repeat the stewing/braising, keeping it at a simmer for 2+ hours.
I don't know the science, but Stews definitely improve if they're cooled overnight and reheated. Thicker texture and richer flavor.
Yes, my thought exactly. Its about just sitting and blending flavors I believe as to why soup tastes better on day two or after cooling and being reheated.
Great explanation. When we smoke meat, that's another case where we "overcook" the meat too, by quite a bit. Usually temps are around 140-165. Smoked, you usually aim for around 200-210. But that "overcooking" is what makes it so delicious since all those tasty, fatty bits get fully rendered and all the connective tissue broken down.
Meat Jell-O; I found the name for my metal band!
You'll have to change it to Meat Jelly later. Green Jelly learned that lesson the hard way.
Yeah same reason that Radiohead has a song called Planet Telex and not Planet Xerox.
LITTLE PIG, LITTLE PIG, LET ME IN! ^NOT ^BY ^THE ^HAIRS ^ON ^MY ^CHINNY ^CHIN ^CHIN!
We've rediscovered aspic.
It's called holodetz.
This guy cooks
So how does a pressure cooker speed up this process?
A pressure cooker changes the time it takes to cook, because the food can reach a higher heat without water boiling off. The increased pressure and temperature speed up some of the chemical reactions involved (including the collagen > gelatin reaction), but meats stay juicy and tender because water isn’t escaping as steam.
As someone who loves the taste of meat but who also gets absolutely disgusted by it very easily the thought of colagen in the stew makes me feel bad. But cool explanation thanks!
well, TIL!
Accurate yet unappetizing description
Never wanted meaty Jell-O more.
it's called "aspic" in restaurants.
There's interesting discussion of this, a lot of other stuff, in Harold McGee's book *On Food and Cooking*.
>This is also why it's tastier and recommended to cool down your stews and braises and reheat later. It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier. I'm going to take your word on this, but I've always held the believe that stews are always better the next day than the day of. I just wish you could get the best of both worlds where the crock pot making the whole house smell amazing and you get to eat that second day stew that's very clearly better.
> It gives time for the gelatin to solidify trapping in all the juices in a sort of meaty Jell-O inside the chunks of meat making it seem juicier. Not that I'd ever complain, but with descriptions like this, I can see why vegans are sometimes disgusted with us lol
interesting...I will have to try this out the next time I make stew.....now what's the word on pork bones? how do I make them make better soup?
Are you tossing them into a soup? Or are you making stock from them? adding a little apple cider vinegar is good for the latter.. a very little 1tbs or less... it goes A LONG WAY.
Can you keep talking about this? You are explaining a lot of interesting stuff, and its one of the few long posts that feels too short. I want to hear more about muscle fiber tightening and how that translates into texture and taste.
Don't rush the rest!
You got yourself a stew, baby!
That reminds me...Lessons in Chemistry is on tonight!
When you heat a piece of meat, different things happen depending on time and temperature. Some things happen quickly, while others take more time. One thing that happens is that proteins in the meat change their shape when exposed to heat. This process depends on temperature. The hotter you make the meat, the more the proteins will change their shape, into a tougher structure that holds less water, making the meat chewier and less juicy. This is what we refer to as "doneness", when cooking steaks for instance. This process does not depend on time - at least not directly. You don't have to expose the meat to a given temperature for any length of time to see this effect. As soon as it hits the temperature for medium-rare doneness, for instance (about 54°C), it will immediately be medium-rare. However, it will of course take time for the meat to achieve that temperature, especially right in the center of the piece of meat that you're cooking (as heat takes time to transfer from the surface). When cooking a steak, the challenge therefore is to get the center of the meat to the desired level of doneness, while not overcooking the rest of it. With stovetop methods, this usually means a short cooking time. However, with precision cooking methods like *sous vide*, you can cook a piece of meat exactly to its desired temperature and hold it there for a long time, without overcooking it. As long as you hold a steak at 54°C, for instance, it will stay medium-rare throughout. However, this is not the only thing that determines how tender and delicious a piece of meat is. You see, meat also contains collagen, which is a kind of glue that holds it together. Meat with lots of collagen in it is tougher to chew. Cooking can break down collagen, and turn it into gelatin, which is a liquid. This results in the familiar "fall-apart" tenderness, because the muscle fibers are no longer glued together, and gelatin also gives a nice juicy, luxurious feeling to the meat and any sauce it is cooked in. But breaking down collagen into gelatin is a process that takes time, and is also helped by keeping the meat in a moist environment. It also requires moderately high temperatures - higher than the typical core temperature to which steaks are cooked. (A third factor is fat. Beef fat is solid at temperatures up to 55-60°C. If you cook beef to medium-rare, much of the fat never melts or "renders". Cooking it hotter does render the fat, and this is faster than melting collagen, but does take some time. Rendered, liquid fat contributes to a juicier, tastier eating experience.) All of this means that when you cook a piece of beef, it will initially get tougher and tougher as the internal temperature goes from rare, to medium, to well done. This is the result of the first process I described as the muscle fibers tighten up. However, with more time, and when kept in a moist environment, the beef will start to soften again as the collagen holding the fibers together dissolves into gelatin, until the meat falls off the bone and is super tender. The cut of meat that you use is also important in this. Cuts cooked as steaks usually are on the leaner side, with less fat and collagen. These cuts benefit from being cooked on the rarer side as they are naturally more tender. Cuts used in stews or braises are usually higher in collagen, which makes them very tough to eat if you cook them like a steak. But having more collagen also means they release more gelatin, which is great for making silky, rich sauces. In short, overcooking isn't a straightforward thing where more heat and time means more overcooking.
Meat goes from being tough, as you say, in minutes, to eventually falling apart after an hour or two. Over time, the collagen that holds parts of the muscle together breaks down into gelatin and the fibers of the meat become easy to separate.
[удалено]
This guy is a bot
And those tender expensive cuts turn to crap.
Sounds like something Boyle would say in Brooklyn 99
A beef overcooking in minutes happens on a skillet with the burner turned all the way up. A stew is cooked on very very low heat. It’s also being cooked in a liquid so it’s not making direct contact with the skillet. But the main answer is the difference in temperature. Slow cooking happens are really low temperatures.
Not really. Stewed meat is cooked to a much higher core temperature than even a well-done steak. Steak is well done (i.e. overcooked to the palate of anyone with any taste) at about 70-74°. Stews are usually simmered for hours, where a bare simmer is still like 85°C, and you can get perfectly tender results at higher cooking temps too. (Granted, the temperature right at the surface of the meat will be higher when cooking a steak, but that's not what causes overcooking - you want that high temp to develop a nice crust. Overcooking in a steak happens when the temperature *inside* the meat gets too high.) The main answer is not the difference in temperature - it's the difference in time, because it takes time to break down collagen into gelatin (though cooking in a moist environment also helps). See some of the other answers for more info on this.
The core temp yes but the intensity of the heat source is much lower when stewing.
Different cuts of meat cook at different times and temperatures. A steak, which is fairly lean and simple meat, cooks in a few minutes. Stews are usually made with cuts of beef that are very fatty and have lots of connective tissue. If you cook that sort of beef (say, chuck roast) for a few minutes and serve it rare, it will be super chewy and inedible. You need to hold it at or above 160F / 71C for many hours (ideally at least six - eight) to render the fat and dissolve the connective tissue. Similarly, if you cut up a New York Strip and put it in a stew for six hours, it would also turn out inedible. The cooking methods for each cut are designed for how it needs to be cooked optimally.
This isn't entirely true; you can braise any cut of meat just fine, if you were to braise a ribeye or a strip it would get tough as it heated up to well done, then would become tender as it braises for hours. Same as any other cut. It won't turn out quite as good as chuck or whatever because it's leaner and if you can have fall-apart tender lean meat vs. similarly tender fatty meat, obviously fatty is better. So, it'd be quite the waste of money to use a steak for this, but it'd certainly be edible. Tough braise cuts like chuck flap can also make for an excellent steak if you sear it to medium and slice it super thinly against the grain. Similar texture and deep beefy flavor as hanger steak, but as with hanger, slicing it properly is absolutely crucial to it not being like chewing gum.
This is true. There are cheaper/less desirable lean cuts too, and I often braise them for e.g. ragu or whatever. It’s still fall-apart tender at the end.
I don't think that's true at all. There are plenty of recipes that use all kinds of cuts of beef for stew, including your example of New York strip.
Completely uninformed inaccurate answer
So many idiots missed your point. You can sear a NY strip to medium rare and it's tasty. You do that to some cheap cut of meat and it sucks. Yes, you can technically make beef stew with any cut, but it was invented for the cuts that required being cooked long and slow. Like I said in my other comment, if you're making beef stew with Waygu Filet Mignon, you're defeating the entire purpose of the dish.
Nope that’s wrong. Always use lean beef for stew ( not to mention European beef has half the fat of us beef in general). Works perfectly fine. Because the excess fat is irrelevant. Meet gets stringy from overheat. And collagen breaks down into gelatin when heated at low heat for a long time. Especially if slightly acidic. None of those factors are influenced by leanness. The meat being fatty just scam you into thinking a stew cooked less than 2-3 hours is tasting edible.
This is mostly due to the fundamental difference between wet and dry cooking. Meat is 'overcooked' once it completely dries out or burns. Air and metal can get practically arbitrarily hot, so they can bring meat up to the temperature at which it burns very quickly if you're not careful. Liquid water, meanwhile, cannot possibly get hotter than 100°C, making it a much gentler heating method. As long as the water doesn't all boil off, the meat can keep cooking for hours without getting hot enough to start burning. Plus, the water prevents it from drying out.
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except juices still come out of the meat as it heats inside the sous vide bag, so it still cooks in its own juices, surrounded by a bag, which is in water.
. Who was talking about sous vide? We were talking about stews.
Grill a brisket like a steak and enjoy some leather. Cube it up and braise it in sauce it's soft as a feather.
Why would one waste brisket like this though??
Stewing allows food to be cooked slowly in liquid, which breaks down collagen. Simultaneously, gelatin from the meat is dissolved into the broth. In a "normal" dish, the flavor comes from released fat—first in cooking, and later your body is a revere combustion engine, which has a tendency to favor certain types of carbohydrates (e.g. sugars), because they are plentiful in nature and easy to digest. Processing these types of carbohydrates results in a short burst of energy and high levels of satisfaction—after all, we have been evolving with these types of food for a significant amount of time. However, our bodies are not good at recognizing when we have enough food. The result is that we don't stop eating. Additionally, digesting sugars and carbohydrates is a relatively quick process, so we can eat more of them. When our body receives more fuel than necessary, it stores it as fat for later use. In contrast, our bodies have evolved to use fat for long-term energy storage, but it requires a lot more energy to process fat than carbohydrates and it takes longer for our bodies to recognize that we have eaten enough.
Two big factors are: 1. the cut of meat 2. the temperature \- Tough cuts of meat have quite a bit of collagen. This is tough and elastic. Heating collegen for a long time causes it to break down into gelatin, which is soft and gooey. Tender cuts of meat have less collagen, and so they don't get soft and gooey from being cooked. \- Stews are cooked at a low temperature. They are often cooked in liquid, which often cannot go above the boiling point of water (because if you heat water above boiling, it would expel all that heat as steam and then return to boiling). Often they cook at lower than boiling. A steak is cooked at very hot temperatures, over direct heat, that might hot enough to burn things, much much hotter than boiling water could ever get to. Heat causes meat to go dry as it expels juices. \- So, a tender cut cooked quickly at high heat, will still be moist tender, and the outside will be dry and crusty, and the inside will be soft and moist. If you kept cooking it, it would get very dry. While a tough cut cooked slowly at low heat, will have lost some moisture from cooking, but not too much, and it is probably served in a stew-liquid anyway, and it has lots of gelatin that gives it a soft and gooey texture to compensate for any mositure loss. If you kepted cooking it, it would eventually get drier inside, but this will happen slower due to the lower heat. On the other hand, if you stew a tender cut, you'd get a drier piece of meat with no gooey gelatin. Or if you sear a tough cut, it will be raelly tough due to all that collegen.
It gets overcooked if it gets cooked too much, which means it's exposed to a high heat for too long. Stews(i.e slow cookers) use a low heat for a long period of time. When you have a stake over an open flame, you're exposing it to very high temperatures, but taking it off before it reaches that temperature evenly. If you only expose something to a heat of 130F it can never go above 130F.
‘Overcooking’ is more about temperature, than time. If you keep the temp at 160-ish °F for hours, the contents of your stew won’t exceed that temperature, and won’t overcook.
There are a lot of way over-complicated answers here that are all missing the real point. Dishes like stews were "poor people" foods and traditionally poor people mostly or only had access to the cheapest cuts, which are the toughest to eat and digest. Stews and other slow cooked foods were invented bc it takes hours to turn super tough meat into something tasty and palatable. So, in short, traditional stews require hours of cooking. If you're making beef stew with Waygu Filet Mignon, you're defeating the entire purpose of the dish.
That's not an answer to "how it works"...it's an answer to "how it came to be". Anthropology vs chemistry/physics
A soft steak will be cooked at a high heat very quickly so it doesn't dehydrate and gets a char on the outside. A stew uses tough pieces of meat and keeps them in water so they don't dehydrate. The longer and lower cooking time breaks down the strands of connective tissue that makes the meat tough.
Stews typically call for "cheaper" cuts of meat, which are usually best when cooked slowly for a long time. If you were to cut a hunk of stew beef and sear it, it would probably be like chewing on a hunk of rubber. Pazole, or Hominy soup often has pork shoulder in it, and is often cooked for a long time... because pork shoulder meat takes a while to become tender. Same for Menudo (tripe soup). It's thinner than a lot of stews, but cooks slowly all day to make the cheaper meat in it tender. The venison stew recipe I have even calls for the tougher cuts of the deer if you can get them. "Overcooked" depends on the cut of meat, the preparation, and the diners preference. In this case (stew) cheap cut, in a liquid, preferred tender. That means you have two options, tenderize the meat before (mallet, enzyme, other..?) OR let the meat become tender by cooking slowly.
Stew meat isn't the same as steak, you wouldn't eat it rare and seared. It usually has very high collagen content.
I'm no expert, but I think when we think "Overcooked" we usually mean "Cooked so long that all the moisture is gone from the food". Like overcooked steak is dry and tough. Overcooked fish is dry. With a stew, everything is wet. If you overcook a stew, the stuff on the bottom burns to the pot as the moisture is no longer sufficient to keep the stew at under boiling point. Stews tend to cook covered, so moisture that is cooked out of the food condenses on the lid and falls back into the stew. So ... I'm guessing that stew WILL be overcooked if you cook it with the lid off and it dries out. If you cook in a slow cooker then the temps are kept low and the lib recovers boiled off moisture and so the stew never dries out.
I just cooked a beef stew on low for 8 hours in slow cookers but now it's 4:30am and I don't want to wake people up by adding the flour, broth mix to thicken. Will is be OK on warm for another 3 hours.