Food Fight

Long-simmering controversies about cooking.

Why is a rare steak not really "bloody"?

Howard Hillman’s great book Kitchen Science holds quite a few surprises. Among them is his explanation of why ordering a steak "bloody red" for rare is really a misnomer. To quote Mr. Hillman: "Blood contributes little to the redness of a steak because most of that liquid is bled out of the meat at the slaughterhouse or butcher shop. The confusion is easy to understand because myoglobin, the principal pigment in raw meat, shares certain characteristics, including color, with hemoglobin (the red pigment in blood). However, myoglobin is distinct from blood; it is found in muscles, not arteries."

There’s a corollary to this, too. Have you ever wondered why beef, for example, is much redder than pork? As you may suspect from the explanation above, it does NOT have to do with "bloodiness." As Mr. Hillman explains, some animals have more myoglobin than others (beef has more than pork). And myoglobin also varies noticeably by anatomical location within a given animal. A chicken’s drumstick, for instance, is much darker than its breast meat — because more myoglobin is stored in the legs of poultry than in the breast. The dominant muscle fiber in the legs is the slow-twitch endurance-type fiber (used for those daily strolls around the barnyard), which depends on myoglobin for its oxygen needs.

Last Bite

Turning Mud Season into Summer

These early spring days can be exhilarating, but when it turns raw and cold, it’s downright bleak. Especially here in northern New England, where the calendar says April but the woods and pastures say November and the dirt roads say Mud. Every year we forget how long it really takes for spring to grab hold.

This year we are growing grass indoors, just to have some greenery. It’s pretty simple — a little potting soil and some annual rye grass seed from the farm store. We put our pots of grass on sunny windows and run our hands through the smooth blades, sniffing that nice clean grassy smell. Our cats love the grass and help themselves to instant salads.

One blustery evening, after supper, we were all pining for a mild summer night, imagining a little campfire and the wonderful ritual of making s’mores, toasting those marshmallows and clamping them between squares of Hershey bars and graham crackers. We all got so hungry for the campfire classic that we decided to make them in the microwave!

Here’s how: place four graham cracker squares on a plate and top each with a square of chocolate bar and a big fat marshmallow. Microwave for 10 to 15 seconds, until the marshmallow puffs up. (Unfortunately, it will not turn golden and blistered.) Immediately remove from the microwave, add another square of chocolate and a top graham cracker to each, and press together gently. Eat at once, and lick your fingers.

We missed the smoky campfire taste, but other than that, we’d briefly turned late mud season into early summer.