MEAT COOKING METHODS
After a long series of articles on meat and how to treat it properly, let us now discuss the common cooking methods and what to think about when we put them into use. Firstly, we start off with the oldest (I guess) methods of grilling and broiling. Grilling the meat over an open fire source or glowing coals is an ancient method of cooking. The temperature reached in glowing coals or gas is so high we cannot just put a thick slice of meat on the griling rack and hope for a nicely cooked piece of meat. The meat has to be quite thin, and it is best if it is tender as well, because what we are looking for is a quickly cooked meat, and not a burned surface with uncooked interior. Of course, one can always compromise. We might brown the meat quickly just near the glowing flames or coal, and then move it higher up and allow for a slower cooking effect. When we broil the meat, we use the same heat source as when we grill, although we put the meat into a pan instead of a grill rack. Naturally, broiling will allow for a longer while of heating before the meat gets destroyed by heat.
What do you do if you want to grill larger cuts of meat then? There is one way to do that! You impale the meat over a spike and then grill it over the burning flames while continuously rotating it. As a result of this rotation, each part of the meat receives the heat in short intervals, and while this part faces away from the flames, it will release most of the heat to the surroundings, while the inner part of the meat will cook slowly by the residual heat. This ancient method of cooking has been used to roast entire animals over the fire flames!
So much for the open heat sources. What happens if we put our meat into an oven? First of all, we get heat that will surround the meat and make the turning unnecessary. The lower the temperature we use, the more gentle heating we get, and the less moisture will disappear, but the browning of the meat will be impaired. The temperature should be used to suit the needs! The hard part of oven roasting is when we try to cook entire animals, whose different parts require different cooking technique to get the best result. For example, when we cook a chicken in the oven, the breast muscle becomes dry if heated too hard, but the leg muscles are too chewy if not heated enough. One way to circumvent this problem is to chill the breast muscles before placing them into an oven, or to roast the different parts of the chicken individually.
The meat can also be fried or sautéed. This is done in a pan, usually on an oil layer, and the heat transfer is high due to the metal surface of the pan. Thus, the meat surface can be browned quickly, essentially requiring the meat to be thin enough to get cooked as soon as the surface is sufficiently browned. If the cut of meat is big, one can always turn down the heat after browning the surface, or put the meat into an oven and let it cook thoroughly in there.
As a last point in this article, let us discuss water as a heat source for cooking meat. Water is a quick heat transfer medium, as opposed to hot air, although you cannot use water to brown the meat. You need oil or other high temperature source to do so. One can combine the two heating sources as well, browning the meat in oil first, and then cook it in water (or a watery mixture, like a stew). In order to preserve the moisture of large tough cuts of meat, one needs to make sure that the meat is not cut into very small pieces from which the juices can quickly escape, as well as cooking the meat in about 200F/90C for a long while (that means, a couple of hours) before raising the temperatue to 250F/120C for an hour. If the meat is okay, take it out; if not, let it cook for a half an hour more or so, and check its texture with a fork. If it's still not good then cook it longer. The meat should be easy to separate by just letting the fork slice through it.
One other way to use water is to use water steam. Steaming is another quick method of cooking, and it's becoming more and more popular, especially among the low-fat dieting people. The heat transfer from the water vapor is quick, so steaming suits itself best to thin cuts of meat, or meat that is wrapped into some dough or leaves that will make the heating more gentle.