Cooking Beef

H. Allan Nation, editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, has an interesting column in the September 2009 issue about cooking beef.

Turns out that prior to World War II almost all beef was boiled. It was easy to do, you could cook the entire animal the same way and it helped remove any bad flavors from the meat. Nation identifies this bad flavor as “adrenaline gaminess that was a major problem with free ranging semi-domesticated cattle of the South and West. Prior to the advent of refrigeration, parboiling was necessary to remove the salt that had preserved the beef. Again this was accomplished by pouring out the first boiling of water.”

The problem with boiling, of course, is that it removes a lot of the flavor and Nation continues “remember that meat protein is largely flavorless, the flavor is in the fat…….In Scotland and West Africa flavor was added by frying beef in tallow. In the American South, saved bacon greases was the primary frying medium.”

Grilling then has only been popular the last 60 years when beef were bred to have more marbeling and fat. The marbeling fat enabled the beef to remain most and tender despite high heat. The Shorthorn breed of cattle in the late 1800s were the first to have significant amounts of marbeling and people really liked the flavor. Beef became much more popular.