7 Wild Facts About Cows You Should Know | Compilation

thanks to lenode cloud computing for supporting this episode of scishow you can go to leno.com scishow to learn more and get a 100 60-day credit on a new lenode account [Music] cows are incredible their burps control the weather they can eat grass and we can eat them but their weather controlling burps can become a problem so here's hank to explain how we're solving it when you think about stuff that contributes to climate change you might picture huge smoke stacks or traffic in los angeles or something that generally looks dirty but how about a huge field full of big-eyed adorable grazing cows it might sound a little silly but when you get enough cows in one place they burp and exhale a lot of methane a greenhouse gas even better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide in fact if cows were a country that nation would be one of the biggest methane producers in the world if not the biggest one way to reduce this is to just eat less meat and dairy and there will be fewer cows created but while that is a great option it's not likely that most people will go vegan anytime soon so researchers are turning to other solutions and they're easier to implement than you might think one option is to change what cows eat right now the average cow mainly eats fibers like hay or grass and they can do that thanks to their complex four-part stomachs which are great at breaking down tough starches so those stomachs are also the problem when a cow swallows hay it ends up in their first stomach chamber called the rumen there microbes get to work fermenting those fibers and preparing them for digestion the issue is that fermentation releases a bunch of hydrogen and carbon dioxide and then other microbes turn those compounds into methane gas which the cow then burps or breathes out over the years scientists have tried to find food or supplements that reduce the amount of methane those microbes make and they've explored everything from corn to various oils but one promising option seems to be seaweed it's not clear exactly why this works but scientists think some components in certain types of seaweed can interfere with one of the catalysts involved in methane production people have been looking into this for a pretty long time but a study published in 2019 demonstrated just how effective it can be in it 12 dairy cows were randomly assigned to three groups all cows ate some hay but one group's diet consisted of one percent seaweed a second group of 0.5 percent seaweed and the third group got no seaweed over several trials each of which lasted three weeks the cows ate their fancy meals and breathalyzers were used to measure how much methane they were exhaling and the results were more dramatic than you would think the cows that received half a percent seaweed yielded about 20 percent less methane and the one percent group yielded about 43 percent less for one percent seaweed still even though the trial went well there were some side effects like the cows were fine but they did release way more hydrogen and carbon dioxide than usual and that makes sense because those compounds would normally combine to form methane but they are greenhouse gases they're just not as potent as methane so that's something we should keep in mind also the solution probably would not be cheap some expense is to be expected of course after all nobody said that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would require zero sacrifices but then there is the bigger problem where do you get all that seaweed there are more than a billion cows on earth so even if we wanted to scale this up a little that's still millions of kilograms of seaweed to grow and that's not something anyone has really tried to do so scientists are trying to find some other options and they might have found a pretty cool one instead of changing a cow's diet you go straight to the source and change their gut microbes in a big paper published in science advances in 2019 researchers studied more than a thousand cows analyzing both their dna and the genetic material of the microbes in their digestive system now as expected not every animal had exactly the same microbes about 500 of them were shared among 50 percent of the animals some of those 500 seem to be involved with the cow's methane production and many of them were at least somewhat heritable in other words they were passed from cow to cow through the generation so if you know which microbes cause cows to make methane and you know that they're heritable well the researchers proposed you could breed cows to produce less methane alternatively since that breeding would take time and we need climate solutions like yesterday it might be possible to use a probiotic to change a cow's microbiome after birth the biggest benefit to this would be that you get to ditch the fancy diets the cows would be exhaling less methane all by their bad selves the lower methane emissions isn't exactly a money maker as far as cow traits are concerned the animals are usually bred for things like size or milk production so for this to take off the cattle industry might need some kind of encouragement at the end of the day it's important to remember that neither of these solutions by themselves will fix climate change or even cow's contributions to it to really make an impact we're going to have to combine things like this and honestly we'll have to combine it with eating less meat which is a really effective option as well for those who can make that choice but the thing is climate change is a big complicated problem and one we will have to approach from dozens if not hundreds of angles so when people work to find and implement real solutions like these there are real reasons to get excited now like i said earlier cows can eat grass which on second thought is not that incredible but hey who am i to talk i can't eat grass at all and here's why not cows really do have it made i mean basically everywhere they look there's grass for them to eat we humans don't have it as easy you could try eating grass but it wouldn't do much for you so what's the difference if cows can digest grass why can't we well cows have the tools to digest the cellulose and grass but we don't our digestive systems just aren't equipped for us cellulose is a complex carbohydrate that consists of long chains of glucose units it makes up plant cell walls which is why it's found in basically all plants like spinach kale and grass most of the plants we eat do also have some nutrients we can digest but grass is basically all cellulose and that cellulose is really hard to break down well unless you're an animal like a cow when a cow munches on some grass it travels down its esophagus and into its four chambered stomach and for every serving of grass this actually happens more than once after the grass gets digested a little it passes into one of the stomach chambers called the reticulum where it forms chunks called cud and then the chunks are regurgitated they're brought back up to the cow's mouth so the cow can grind them up a bit more and break down the food even further eventually the cow swallows the food again which makes its way back to the stomach sounds delicious it's not just cows that do this other animals like sheep and goats regurgitate their food too they're called ruminants the main area of the stomach is the largest chamber of the four the rumen it's where the grass-digesting magic happens see it's not actually the cow that's digesting the cellulose in the grass it's the tiny microbes living inside the cow's rumen these guys do their job without oxygen in a process known as anaerobic cellulose digestion it involves two main steps enzyme production and fermentation in enzyme production the microbes in the rumen secrete certain enzymes like cellulase which helps break down the cellulose one of the main ways that's done is by hydrolyzing the cellulose where a chemical reaction involving water breaks the cellulose up into smaller carbohydrates like glucose but the enzymes are the real stars of the show acting as catalysts that kick-start the reaction from there the leftover smaller carbohydrates are fermented meaning they're metabolized and converted into fatty acids like acetic acid the acid and vinegar butyric acid which is found in milk and propionic acid an acid that's often used as a food preservative these later get absorbed as nutrients after all that the partially digested grass eventually reaches the abbamasum which is the acidic part of the stomach that's similar to ours here the food is digested even more and eventually enters the cow's small and large intestines so the main players in grass digestion are the microbes humans can't digest grass because we don't have those microbes to produce the enzymes we'd need to break down cellulose we do have the enzymes to digest other carbohydrates like starch and simple sugars we're just missing the ones that digest cellulose but what if you could just take some of the microbes that are in a cow's rumen and put them into your stomach and let them do their thing that probably wouldn't work because your stomach is way too acidic for the cellulose digesting process to happen the ph of your stomach is normally around one to three which is very acidic the ph of the rumen where the grass-digesting microbes live in cows is closer to a more neutral six or seven the microbes stop breaking down cellulose at a ph of 5.5 or lower so putting them in your stomach wouldn't give you the ability to digest grass but there are two other potential homes for these microbes your small and large intestines but neither is a good choice the ph in your small intestine is much more neutral but the microbes might try to compete with you for the nutrients in the digestive food and your large intestine wouldn't be able to absorb the nutrients from the grass so putting microbes in it to break down cellulose wouldn't make much of a difference another option might be to just swallow some cellulase like how people who are lactose intolerant can take a pill with a lactase enzyme which allows them to have dairy but researchers haven't yet developed a practical method for extracting the enzymes that would allow you to digest grass and even if they did we don't know what effects it would have on your health so as convenient as it would be to graze on your front lawn for dinner it's probably best to leave the grass to the cows now in a cow's world if it's good enough to eat once it's good enough to bring it back and eat again and they don't just recycle their food they also recycle their pee i mean ultimately they're still recycling the same nutrients from their food just after it's been processed a little more but here's a slightly younger version of me to tell you how and why a cow would do a thing like that every day you pee out a valuable resource nitrogen your body uses nitrogen in everything from making amino acids to expanding blood vessels but after processes like digestion your body binds it up in urea a compound we can't do much with and it all goes swirling down the drain in some ways it's our loss and it turns out that ruminants like sheep and cows really have us beat because they've evolved a way to recycle their urea so it ends up not in their urine but in their spit overall urea isn't a bad thing it might steal some of our sweet sweet nitrogen but it also prevents us and other mammals from poisoning ourselves you see some processes including normal protein digestion produce ammonia a toxin made of hydrogen and nitrogen and if that ammonia built up in the body it would keep brain cells from efficiently transporting potassium which could end up causing severe brain damage or death but instead it gets shuttled off to liver cells which turn it into urea then the urea eventually ends up in the bladder since we use nitrogen for so much peeing out urea may seem like a waste but for us humans it's not all bad while recycling urea would be great from a nutrient perspective it would also leave us with a bunch of extra nitrogen that could turn into ammonia basically the extra nitrogen could be nice but we don't always have something to do with it cue the ruminants ammonia is dangerous for them too but they can and do recycle urea and the nitrogen in it they just have something to do with it they feed it to their gut microbes the process starts like it does in humans with ammonia getting turned into urea by the liver some of the urea goes into their urine but some of it takes another journey into their bloodstream and some of that urea ends up in their salivary glands it might sound kind of gross but it's not like they're directly peeing into their mouths and i mean if you want more nitrogen in your diet swallowing it is as easy as it gets as they swallow their food and saliva the urea enters the rumen the first chamber in their stomach and there it meets a bunch of microbes that's where the party starts those microbes have enzymes that turn the urea into all kinds of useful things like amino acids that the animal can use to run its body this is called the protein regeneration cycle or urea recycling and it's kind of like an insurance policy even if ruminants don't eat enough nitrogen-rich foods they have this backup system for getting the nutrients they need granted the rumen microbes process nitrogen on the first pass through the gut too but some ruminants can recycle nitrogen around two full times or more before excreting it which is way more efficient than what we do today researchers are learning how to alter this system to reduce the amount of nitrogen these animals excrete since compounds like nitrous oxide and cow manure are greenhouse gases but even if we can't learn how to make this work for us it's an amazing adaptation for them with a little help from their friends they're getting more from their food than we ever could having a system to send pee back into your mouth seems a little unsanitary but that would only be a problem if it made them sick and when it comes to your health there's an argument for pee over say cannibalism here's what happened when we fed cows to cows mad cow disease is the common name for a condition called bovine spongiform encephalopathy or bse it's a progressive neurological disease that affects cows and over time it causes severe brain and nervous system damage which eventually leads to trouble standing walking and changes in mood like increased aggression and nervousness the spongiform part of the name just means spongy because the infection creates a bunch of holes in the cow's brain where its cells should be the first two cases of bse were identified in the uk in 1986 but it takes a really long time for symptoms to show up so scientists think the first infections probably date back to the 70s during the outbreak's peak in 1993 almost a thousand new cattle were infected each week but that number has gone down dramatically since then bse is caused by a bizarre self-replicating protein called a prion other pathogens like bacteria and viruses use dna to make copies of themselves but a prion is just a deformed version of a normal protein that's found in cell membranes sometimes those proteins can go rogue and get bent out of shape but right now we don't totally understand how or why it happens and when those proteins become prions they can bind to other proteins like them and make them bend in the same way and then those messed up prions corrupt even more proteins and so on clumps of them collect and spread in the brain and nervous system eventually causing brain damage but that takes a while so symptoms usually don't show up until years later all of that is terrible but how bse got started is almost as horrifying it probably happened because cattle were being fed ground-up meat and bones from sheep and other cows there's another prion disease in sheep called scrapey and it's possible that scrapey prions may have jumped to cows through their food and caused this whole mess but it's also possible bse just showed up when a random protein folded the wrong way no matter how it started the cattle feed only made things worse because after cows died of bse they were ground up and fed to healthy cows so the disease kept going unfortunately a version of the disease can infect people too the human version of bse is called variant kreutzfeld jakob disease or vcjd and it's also caused by bent prions we don't know for sure that it comes from eating infected cattle but since they're both prion diseases and both outbreaks happened around the same time most scientists think that's the case like with mad cow disease the symptoms of vcjd can take years to show up but once they do things move pretty quickly brain degeneration happens in just a few months with symptoms like trembling dementia trouble walking and eventually a coma since no cure exists yet patients usually die within a year worldwide there have been about 230 cases of vcjd and about 180 of those were in the uk the rest were mainly in europe and there have been only four cases in the united states but they were all picked up overseas the rate at which people have been getting infected has gone way down since the 90s but scientists will keep studying it because there are other kinds of kreutzfeld jacob disease not caused by cows before mad cow disease was a thing we knew about cjd as a rare condition that could appear if a random protein went bad usually through an inherited mutation or through medical procedures like transplants today we keep the risk of variant cjd low by giving cows safer food and making sure no nervous system tissue gets into our beef and even though the risk is small you also can't donate blood in the u.s if you spent too much time in high-risk countries or got a blood transfusion in europe because there's a chance prions could be spread through blood too mainly it's those new farming practices that have really helped get the disease under control and in 2016 there were no new reports of bse and cows in the uk for the first time since the outbreak started which is both exciting and a relief also because mad cow disease is transmitted through nervous system tissue there's no evidence you can get it from milk or the meat used to make things like hamburgers and steak so your roast beef is not out to get you which is always good to know while there aren't many new cases we can't say for sure that mad cow disease is eradicated like we can say for the cattle plague so here's how we got rid of that problem once and for all viruses are bags of genetic material that are caught between life and non-life they need living cells to replicate and spread lots of them make us sick like the flu measles or hiv and as a species we humans are getting better at preventing viral diseases but eradication or eliminating them completely is much harder we have done it before though the eradication of the deadly smallpox virus declared by the world health organization in 1980 is hailed as one of humanity's greatest achievements and there's just one other time that humans kicked that viral butt rinder pest or cattle plague vaccines and global efforts beat this lethal virus for good and we learned a lot along the way but every virus presents a different challenge so each one needs lots of research to come up with effective treatments rinderpest was a nasty livestock disease infected cattle had a high chance of dying suffering from a mix of fever diarrhea and discharge from almost every orifice all of those bodily fluids helped the virus spread and it really spread originally from asia rinderpest slowly moved into europe and then became an epidemic in africa in the 1880s in ethiopia rinderpest wiped out a third of the human population by killing the animals they depended on for food and transport and it didn't go away rinderpest caused devastation across these three continents and fear everywhere else quarantine and basic hygiene strategies helped a little but what we needed was a vaccine a little dose of weakened virus to train cattle immune systems to recognize and attack the enemy an early vaccine from the 1920s used a technique called serial passage making a weakened form of rinderpest by growing the virus in multiple animals or cells in a lab in this case the scientist jt edwards infected a different species so that the virus evolved to suit goats rather than cattle if you then put this modified virus back into a cow the cow's immune system can safely fight it and build up anti-rinder pest antibodies in case the normal virus comes along but this method takes a long time and researchers had to look after a whole herd of goats which isn't practical for mass vaccination plus sometimes the virus would partially revert back to its original form and still cause disease by the 1950s we knew how to grow cells in petri dishes a technique known as tissue culture using time luck and cereal passage in lab-grown calf kidney cells vet scientist walter plowright developed a new rinderpest vaccine riddled with a bunch of weakening mutations and best part no goats necessary it worked more reliably and rinder pest infection rates plummeted in the next few decades but without a cooperative global effort bouts of rinderpest kept popping back up it was like deadly whack-a-mole for cows so in 1994 the global rinder pest eradication program was launched its mission to target rinderpest's major outposts then destroy it completely the program's success depended on science and society at local and international levels researchers studied how the virus worked and spread and used mathematical models for more strategic vaccination rather than trying to vaccinate as many cattle as possible animals were injected with a new heat stable form of the vaccine which didn't need to stay refrigerated outside the lab local farmers were really involved in educating people about rinderpest they made up a surveillance network to look out for new resurgences of the disease or confirm healthy areas and in 2011 10 years after the last recorded case rinderpest was officially declared eradicated at least in the wild since some lab samples still exist we learned a lot during our long but victorious battle against rinderpest so why haven't we eliminated all viruses well even though it was devastating rinderpest was actually more of like an entry-level viral problem rinderpest mutated relatively slowly and didn't vary much between strains so one vaccine fit all and immunity lasted a lifetime take influenza viruses for a comparison which changed their genetic material so much that new vaccines are made each year to keep up also rinderpest's horrible symptoms were pretty obvious making it easy to find outbreaks and isolate infected herds meanwhile viruses like zika can spread quietly through asymptomatic carriers and other viruses like hiv lie low for years before taking their toll these viruses are much harder to track so render best may be a thing of the past but the world is still full of viruses and the future is unknown as we've seen from hiv zika and ebola new viruses can seemingly pop up out of nowhere and spread fast when they do the race is on to understand the viruses activity strengths and weaknesses so that we can find the best strategies to prevent infection and disease and we are getting better at it thanks to better technology and communication networks but each virus still presents unique threats and challenges with food welfare and lives at stake we need to remember that science and global policy work hand in hand to stamp out deadly viruses for good compared to eradicating cattle plague setting up your business on the cloud is a piece of cake so thanks to lenode cloud computing for supporting this video lenode provides cloud-based storage software analytics and more to you or your company being cloud-based means that lenode's computing resources can help you accomplish your goals in minutes and on demand and they're flexible so you only pay for what you need and what you use with no hidden fees or extra gotchas lenode makes cloud computing for small businesses more affordable and scalable if they grow larger lenode will be there to grow with your business with award-winning professional customer service representatives on call 24 7 365 days of the year to check it out click the link in the description or head to leno.com scishow that link will give you a 100 60 day credit on a new lenot account and once you've got your business up and running with lenode you'll have time for that work barbecue you've been planning and if you're looking for the best way to cook your plague-free steak well science has the answers and here's a hint it's not searing here's michael to explain why searing meat is a delicious lie we've all heard it somewhere that we should sear meat before we cook it to lock in the juices funnily enough that reasoning is completely wrong but you should still sear your steaks this misconception has been around for a really long time and it might have gotten some traction in the 1840s thanks to eustis von liebig a german chemist who wrote about the benefits of searing meat in his book researches on the chemistry of food we've actually known this to be untrue for a while for example it was debunked in research published back in 1974. the results of that study showed that searing actually causes meat to lose more moisture not less in a sample of 12 seared cuts of meat and 12 unseared control samples the ones that got a blast of heat first lost slightly more moisture around three percent similar experiments have been conducted over the years in the lab and in the kitchen with similar results some experiments have shown no difference in moisture loss while in others non-seared stakes stayed a bit more moist either way there's not a huge difference in searing first versus not it's pretty clear that it's not helping to keep a steak juicy and honestly if you look at the surface of a steak you might notice that it doesn't look very leak-proof after it's been seared these things do tend to sizzle muscle tissue contains long filaments called myofibrils heating damages these fibers and causes them to lose water over time the extent of water loss varies and temperature plays a big part higher temperatures contribute to higher moisture loss especially above 60 degrees celsius which corresponds to about medium doneness so if searing doesn't lock in juices why do we find this myth so hard to let go we might think that seared steaks are juicier because they taste better we know that fat and flavor contribute to our subjective impression of juiciness on top of that browning meat leads to mire reactions and they create a ton of flavor the french chemist louis camille mayar described the reactions in the early 1900s a my r reaction sequence begins with the reaction of a sugar and an amino acid after that there are a bunch of different ways the reaction can proceed depending on factors like temperature and ph and it's not just one reaction many small chemical reactions are occurring at the same time producing new flavors smells and creating the browning color we associate with cooking meat as well as many other foods so when meat is seared the mayara effect does create a bunch of tasty flavors but it doesn't lock in juices that might explain why this myth has had so much staying power searing might not do what we think it does but it is a good idea a delicious delicious idea like i said science has the secrets to cooking cow with all the flavors you want some of it has to do with the cow's biology and other parts of the equation lie in their chemistry so if you're looking to impress at the barbecue this summer check out these science-backed tips for cooking cow it's summer time for those of us in the northern hemisphere which means one thing barbecue season this style of food prep is all about heat and flames and how to control them for the tastiest meat or veggies and just like your kitchen at home there's plenty of overlap between a chemistry lab and your backyard barbecue so here are five science-based hacks that you can use at home to step up your barbecue game first things first no matter which animal it comes from that protein-rich slab of meat is muscle and land-based animals have layers of connective tissue wrapping those tiny muscle fibers into bundles and a type of connective tissue called perimysium wraps those bundles into larger bundles this bundle seption continues until it's no longer microscopic you can even see the bundles if you look closely but the way that the connective tissue wraps around muscle fibers determines the grain of the meat or which direction those bundles point towards now some cuts of meat like skirt steak or flank have a thicker more easily visible grain they have larger muscle bundles with lots of connective tissue compared to something like tenderloin this makes them tougher to bite which is where this tip comes in handy cutting at a 90 degree angle to the grain as opposed to parallel with the grain will result in a more tender bite in your mouth how do we know well tenderness is a hugely sought after quality so folks in the meat industry actually measure this a procedure called the warner bratzler shear force test was invented to objectively assess meat tenderness you basically take a tube-shaped section of meat and put it under a mini guillotine then measure how much force it takes to cut through the sample this test mimics what we do with our teeth when we bite into a stake so it's a pretty good standard for objectively measuring tenderness now back in your backyard by cutting perpendicular to the grain you're separating the muscle into a cross section short muscle fiber is separated by that structurally weak connective tissue a 1985 study in meat science which is a real peer-reviewed journal showed that perimysium broke down much more readily than muscle fibers so by cutting across the grain you're letting the heavy butcher knife do the work of breaking down the muscle so your teeth don't have to now most of the time adding heat is a predictable experiment the longer you cook something for the hotter it becomes until it burns to a crisp but something different happens when you slow cook meat on a barbecue it's a phenomenon known as the barbecue stall the internal temperature of the meat will climb for a while but then level out even though it's still over hot coals and the internal temperature might stall for hours leaving you to wonder if the gods of thermodynamics have somehow cursed your grill in particular a few explanations have been offered like maybe the heat energy is selectively melting the fat or that collagen a protein in connective tissue turns into liquid gelatin when temperatures get above 70 degrees celsius but stalling happens at an internal temperature around 60 to 70 degrees celsius too cool for collagen to gelatinize or for fat to melt so a more likely hypothesis is that this leveling out is due to evaporative cooling water inside the meat evaporates and carries heat away much like how sweat cools our skin on a hot day then once the meat dries out a bit the internal temperature finally starts to rise again some researchers from texas a m university attempted to measure this a few years ago at a food themed outreach event where they measured the stall in real time to do this they compared the internal temperature of brisket wrapped in foil to totally exposed meat and they found that meat without foil experienced a stall at 60 degrees for about two hours but the foil wrapped meat didn't so they concluded that the foil prevented the evaporative cooling effect so the meat continued to rise in temperature and in 2011 a physicist performed an informal citizen science experiment where he took a chunk of beef fat and threw it in a smoker alongside a sponge filled with cellulose water fat is hydrophobic meaning it doesn't store water like muscle does so it shouldn't experience any stall from water evaporating sure enough the sponge experienced a temperature stall comparable to a proper brisket on the other hand the fat heated up steadily and ended up as a glistening puddle on the bottom of the smoker now when you think of marinades you probably think of the good old immersion technique soaking the meat in some kind of salty flavorful or acidic liquid for a long period of time can do everything from adding flavor to tenderizing before meat hits the grill but it's more complicated than that certain ingredients are better at certain jobs than others marinades like brine or soy sauce can be used as a tenderizer because of their high salt content that's because salts are good at breaking down what are called myofibrillar proteins namely actin and myosin in a living animal these filaments slide past each other to perform muscle contraction but when muscle becomes meat they're still complex interlocking structures luckily the salts can unfold them specifically the negative chloride ion in salt binds to the filaments and creates an electrostatic repulsion while the filaments are usually tightly packaged this repulsion spreads them apart and lets water molecules trickle into the newly opened areas it's like using similar poles on two magnets to repel each other but instead of magnets you have similarly charged ions this increases the space between strands of protein which lets the muscle hold on to even more water now sometimes you might choose acidic marinades like lime juice lemon juice or vinegar which tenderize meat slightly differently marinades with a low ph do help break down some of that connective tissue and add flavor to the meat but they don't increase the meat's ability to hold onto water one solution according to a 2007 review in the journal applied poultry research was to combine the water retaining properties from salty marinades with more acidic solutions to get the best of both worlds a final type of marinade involves using enzymes from fruits like papaya papayan from papayas or bromelain from pineapples to break down the connective tissue between muscle bundles now as for how long you should marinate for that's up to you researchers in 1999 found that chicken fillets experienced their biggest uptake in water during the first five minutes of marination with much slower absorption in the half hour afterwards but a study published in 2010 compared the effects of marinating time on servings of chicken and found that the best tasting fillets resulted from a three hour soak time compared to 30 60 or 120 minutes so do you really need to marinate overnight well you can see some benefit in just a few minutes but you might notice more flavor after a longer soak look we've all been there figuring out the delicate balance of exactly how many seconds in the microwave makes the difference between a burrito that's frozen in the middle versus one that tastes like rubber and grill masters run into the same problem just with really big slabs of meat they want to end up with a brisket that's both tender and juicy which is tricky meat needs to reach a certain temperature threshold for some of its tougher elements like collagen to break down but crank up the heat too high and you'll lose more water making it taste dry enter slow cooking using low temperatures applied over multiple hours of cooking time to get exactly the right internal temperature and that precision is necessary because different chemical events happen at different temperatures by 50 degrees you've already started denaturing some of the proteins in meat like myosin and between 60 and 70 degrees the tough connective collagen starts to denature and become gelatin but you want to stick to the lower end of that range because the enzyme that helps break down collagen is only active under 60 degrees and that process takes its sweet time a 2005 review found that it took more than six hours to see significant tenderization benefits from slow cooking so the sweet spot seems to be an internal temperature around 60 degrees and definitely not higher than 70. that way the proteins that are tough to the bite have denatured which tenderizes the meat and meanwhile it's lost as little moisture as possible even just a few degrees hotter and you risk losing the benefits although increased temperatures will further denature collagen and turn it to gelatin the meat overall starts to shrink as water is lost that means the other proteins in the meat will start clumping together making it tougher researchers in 1968 reported that as meat rose above 60 degrees celsius the tenderness progressively decrease basically the extra breakdown of collagen can't compensate for the toughness caused by the other proteins condensing this is why slow cooking is desirable there's little room for error when you're aiming for the best balance between juiciness and tenderness you need to hit a super precise temperature target and slow cooking makes that easier to do other than keeping you from burning your mouth allowing barbecued meat to rest for a few minutes after taking it off the grill will actually help it retain moisture usually that means taking meat off the grill and subjecting it to less intense heat before slicing into it during cooking some of the proteins including actin myosin and collagen shrink together which decreases the amount of space available for water to hang out think of any time you may have overcooked a chicken breast it probably shriveled up and dried out now at certain temperatures the proteins shrink irreversibly contrary to the popular belief behind resting these proteins don't get their structure back if they cool down once they're heated up they stay in that misfolded shape but other mechanisms can reabsorb some of the water that's been squeezed out it's been hypothesized that capillary action the phenomenon where water moves through thin columns on its own could play a role on paper the spaces between muscle filaments could pull up a column of water up to 300 meters if you could find a slab of meat that big but it hasn't been investigated specifically in reference to the resting effect but a lot of water stays outside of the filaments so regardless of how long you rest the meat you still can't hold on to all of it unfortunately there's no universal law for how long you should rest the meat but as a general rule the larger the roast the longer you wait so the next time your friends are laughing at you for claiming science can enhance your barbecue show them the light with your flawless brisket all it takes is a little understanding of the chemistry of protein fat water and salt well thanks for learning about cows with me from burps to beef and if you'd like to share your cattle curiosities with a young animal lover you can watch our scishow kids video all about cows [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 293,162

Keywords: SciShow, science, education, learn, cows, methane, digestion, ruminants, mad cow disease, cattle plague, sear meat, beef, Geting To Know Cows Inside and Out | Compilation, stefan chin, 7 Wild Facts About Cows You Should Know | Compilation, Hank Green, SciShow cows, learn about cows, methane and cows, methane gas cows, cows and environment, are cows bad for the environment, are cows bad for planet, beef industry, beef and the environment, is beef bad for the earth, vegetarian, cute cows

Id: GgPZzxrNeZs

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2022