Splitting hairs in the crock

Read a farm related magazine the other day where the writer of the article said she took old, tough freezer burned meat and turned it into a tasty, tender stew in the crockpot.

What a load of crap.

Let's be clear here. I am becoming alarmed at the number of farming type people who seem to have no clue the difference between fine, tender meat, and skanky old boot leather. It's as if anything that drops onto their plate, if it was raised by their own hand, is the creme de la creme of meat. This is simply, utterly and absolutely UNTRUE. It is hugely possible to raise an animal (pick any edible barnyard beast) and have it turn out a gustatory nightmare. Not all meat, by virtue of it having been raised on the farm, is worth eating. NOt by a long shot.

Back to freezer burn magic lady. She employed a crock pot to turn old, tough meat into mouth watering stew. No. She did not. Why oh why, do people who think they know their way around a kitchen FAIL to recognize that you cannot, have never, and will never, be able to make tough meat tender? Tough meat is tough. Tender meat is tender. Period. Get over it, people!

A crock pot is a device of pulverization. So is a pressure cooker. I know a lady who used to make all her stews in a pressure cooker and crow mindlessely about how tender they were. Hah! Blasted to smithereens is NOT tender, it's just blasted to smithereens. THe crock pot does not make anything tender, it just cooks it until it disintergrates and makes the odious task of chewing slightly less task like. But TOUGH MEAT cooked beyond recognition in a crock pot is still TOUGH MEAT. It is broken down into mush that challenges the mandibles less, but it does not and cannot change the basic structure of the meat. Dry, tough meat, even swimming in broth, is still dry tough meat. And that's the truth.

People are champions at deluding themselves, telling themselves happy little fairytales. "Look, I have lousy beef, but with the aid of this device, the pressure crock, I can magically turn it all into tenderloin and prime rib." In your dreams, lady.

Why can't we call a spade a spade? Why can't we openly admit that the crock and pressure cookers are useful devices for making those difficult cuts or WORSE grass fed beef (hee hee), more tolerable at the table? We all know we have tough meat sometimes, we know that you have to subject it to something a little more gruelling than slow roasting in the oven. That's okay, that's not a personal failure. But the failure comes when we cross into make believe and call pre-chewed food, tender. It is broken down, it is crumbled and unrecognizable. BUt you know what? It is often still stringy and dry. If you start with stringy and dry, you will end up with stringy and dry, in a sauce.

What scares me though is that perhaps there are people out there raising it wrong, killing it wrong and perhaps they truly think that crock potted brisket is tender? Is it possible that there are people out there tolerating bad meat? If you have always had bad beef, you wouldn't know a top quality, triple A, grain finished fatty if it hit you in the head.

Hubby grew up on a farm and remembers raising their own beef, but never once recalls eating a rib steak, t-bone or prime rib roast. He remembers tough meat. Strong and gamey ground beef. It's as if the good cuts magically disappeared and the left overs were what the family got. WRONG WAY TO DO IT! And it creates people who think tough meat into a crock pot comes out tender. My dad farmed too but with the view that hay making, cold weather farming and slaughter better result in meat that melts on the tnogue. The very best cuts in OUR freezer and the less so to someone else. If your freezer does not hold the very best beef that money can make...you're doing it wrong. We had EXCELLENT meat growing up, not a crock pot in sight!

I love my crock pot, it helps the budget, but anything that goes in tenderly challeneged comes out beaten, mushed and goopy, but I never fool myself into thinking it's tender! That's just a crock.

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I hear ya on the grass fed beef...YUCK!

When we first moved to the farm I bought some cows, grass fed them and didn't give them any antibiotics. Basically because I heard all the hipe about naturally raised beef. Well all I can say is yuck. It tasted so gamey that dh and the boy won't even eat it, they will eat bbq'ed steak but that's it, such a shame but another lesson learned the hard way

Prairie Chick, you raise another point that makes me batty. This idea that 'naturally raised' means it's never been given anitbiotics.

I believe in ETHICAL raising, and if an animal is sick or injured and needs antibiotics , I give it the antibiotics because to withold needed medication, to me, borders on abuse. It is one thing to treat a sick animal when it needs it. It is entirely another to give an animal antibiotics every day of its life because you are raising it in a sick way, raising it so beyond its natural way of being that your farming practices are making it sick! But somewhere, somehow, treating a sick/injured animal has become muddied with lousy, inhumane raising practices. THese are not the same issue. You can give a sick animal antibiotics and still consider it 'naturally raised' in my opinion.

And not just any cow will make good eating. Yes, any cow CAN be eaten, but it's comparing apples and oranges. I have eaten Jersey. Once. This is coyote food, sorry to say. So people who toddle off to the auction and bring home any old critter and call it beef are often in for a disappointment on the plate.

DO lots of people eat dairy cattle? Indeed. Is it good beef? Not in this lifetime! It's just beef, but not GOOD beef.

Then there's the whole issue of good slaughter and bad slaughter, and how you can DESTROY all your hard work by chasing the animal a few laps around the pen before shooting it...or trucking it miles to a slaughter facility to be prodded down chutes by strangers. Good beef is like fine China, requires delicate handling, deliberate attention to breed and feed, life and death. It is not as easy as to toss a cow on the back 40 and expect good beef. It is an art.

Prairie Chick wrote:I hear ya on the grass fed beef...YUCK!

When we first moved to the farm I bought some cows, grass fed them and didn't give them any antibiotics. Basically because I heard all the hipe about naturally raised beef. Well all I can say is yuck. It tasted so gamey that dh and the boy won't even eat it, they will eat bbq'ed steak but that's it, such a shame but another lesson learned the hard way

I hear ya on that. I really don't like grass fed beef either. The yellow fat grosses me out!

Antibiotics do not stay in an animal forever until the end of time. There are with holding periods. You do not shoot and animal up and then butcher it, that would be stoopid.

I am not a huge fan of slow cooked beef. I like the prime cuts that can be cooked fast and hard and medium rare in the middle. That is how I like my beef! I will slow cook the other cuts to make them more edible, but I like them in stews or soups and not really as roasts. The slow cooked stuff just has a texture I am not wild about. Like Uno says, it is not tender, but smooshy.

Holstein is one of the higher marbled animals but it takes so long and so much feed to finish them it becomes an arduous journey. We had one Holstein steer when we were kids, he was pretty good eating, nice flavour cause he was older, but not like a young Angus steer (or heifer for that matter, I prefer eating heifer) that is for sure.

Uno raises good points about processing too. You can make a dark cutter pretty easy if you want to chase them around. The meat is darker when it is processed, tough and has a funny taste. If you look carefully you can even see dark cutters in the super market.

It is an art. All our animals are ultra sounded eye muscle area, rib eye, intrmuscular fat and have EPDs. It takes some of the guess work out of breeding them but doesn't make it fool proof. When you start with a good package, it is easier to feed it right and get a good product. Uno is right, to get good beef you can't just put it out to grass and wait a bit and take it to a butcher. They have to be finished right. With a little research you can do one at home, no reason you can't but don't think it can be any old cow at any old time on any old day. Just doesn't work like that.

Hm.. while I don't think you can cook out freezer burn, I do think the way you cook meat has an awful lot to do with how tender, or not, it is. Any fool can wreck a perfectly good cut of meat, but it takes a good cook to make a bad cut of meat taste good.

Briarwood...I don't know if I agree or disagree?

A good cook can indeed take a so-so cut of meat and make it taste good. But taste and tenderness are not the same thing. A good cook can take a so-so cut of meat and by babying it along just so, maybe with a slow cooker, produce an awesome meal. But I still maintain that tough meat can TASTE good, but will still be tough.

And for a truly good piece of meat to be ruined, a cook has to do something pretty heinous. It is difficult to ruin a AAA prime rib, unless you are going out of your way to do so. I have always found that the truly superior cuts of beef were pretty fool proof. IT was those mid-grade cuts, the ones that could go either way, that required more skilled cooking and could be ruined or perfected, depending on who was in the kitchen that day.

*shrug* to each their own I don't have anything against slow cooked food, I don't find it tough. I also eat game meat quite often and don't mind that either (venison, moose, etc). I've grown up with good cooks and have been blessed with tender (to me at least) meat 99% of the time. But I do know grandma could sure butcher (no pun intended) pretty well any meat you bought.

I don't mind crockpot meat either. In fact, I use my crockpot a lot! But the dry, chewy pork bits I put it in last week came out dry and chewy, even after 5 hours of pulverization.

My point is that tough meat remains tough meat. Period. The idea that you can tnederize tough meat in a crockpot/pressure cooker is pure bunk. You can cook it down to its smallest possible component, but it will still be a mouthful of less than prime cut. More chewable, maybe, and flavourful, certainly. But a crock pot will never turn a shoulder roast into prime rib.

THe lady who wrote that recipe should never have claimed to make a wonderful 'tender' stew, although it makes for better reading. What I thnk she should have said, that might have been more honest, would be, "The crock pot is your best bet for helping this old, burnt meat become tasty and easier to chew." THAT is an honest review on the abilities of a crockpot! THAT admits that tough is tough and you have to handle it accordingly, expect to improve it slightly, but it is what it is. That's all. This is not about whether crocked meat is good or bad. It's about the crazy idea that the crockpot can turn chuck into tenderloin. NO IT CAN'T!

I was also told by a butcher once good meat was good meat. That a very good beast he could tell right off the start and really didn't need to hang long. An average beast could be greatly improved by hanging and become a good beast but very bad was always not going to be very good no matter how long it hung.

I am not a butcher and don't know anything about it, but he was a good one so I took him at his word. We always got great stuff from him, but they were always lovely, fattened heifers he started with.

That's true too Cooplave! And now, I'd like some prime rib......

Ha, ha, me too. I was just in the freezer looking for some steaks!

BriarwoodPoultry wrote:Hm.. while I don't think you can cook out freezer burn, I do think the way you cook meat has an awful lot to do with how tender, or not, it is. Any fool can wreck a perfectly good cut of meat, but it takes a good cook to make a bad cut of meat taste good.

I agree with you. I come from a family of cooks. Anyone can start off with the very best of ingridents including the meat. If they haven't a clue on how to prepare and cook it it's going to come out terrible.

Preparing meat depends on the type of meat you are working with. What the animal was fed, given, raised, slaughtered, the product cured afterward, even to how the meat is stored and for how long. All of it affects taste.

Cooking can improve the taste of any piece of meat, but only to a point. Freezer burnt meat can be prepared and eaten safely but obviously it isn't going to have the same taste as the same type of meat that has no freezer burn.

What is more of an issue when it comes to meat that has been frozen is the length of time it has been in storage. Many people have the idea that anything you freeze goes into some sort of suspended animation and it doesn't go bad.
Frozen meat does in fact go bad. While some meat can store frozen for up to a year, most shouldn't be frozen for more that 6 months.

Last week I found a prime rib I had bought on sale and put in the freezer, in 2009. Hmmmm. I cooked it, but it wasn't the greatest. It was definietly freezer burnt. Tender, but had that funky freezer flavour. So much for suspended animation!

uno wrote:Last week I found a prime rib I had bought on sale and put in the freezer, in 2009. Hmmmm. I cooked it, but it wasn't the greatest. It was definietly freezer burnt. Tender, but had that funky freezer flavour. So much for suspended animation!

Living on the edge