Meat juice is not blood, and the difference matters

hey heads up this video features some very mild shots of a very small amount of human blood if that's going to make you pass out or something maybe stop operating heavy machinery now or you know watch something else okay contrary to what people say this is not blood this is not blood this is not blood and this is not blood there that's blood viscous and fire engine red people may call this a bloody steak and while there is probably some Trace amount of blood in all meat that's not what you're looking at here what you're looking at here is meat juice which goes by a number of more technical or scientific names that we will examine more importantly I'm here to try to persuade you that the difference between blood and meat juice is Meaningful this is not just some little bit of idle semantic quibbling from a pet ant though that's obviously the kind of thing that I would do now the difference between blood and juice is really big both culinarily and culturally when animals are slaughtered for meat their major arteries are cut and they are hung so that gravity pulls out nearly every drop of blood the circulatory system is fluid by Design stuff flows easily through it and it goes out onto the abattoir floor at least that's if you do it right if the animal is really scared or otherwise excited right before Slaughter then the smaller blood vessels might contract a little bit and trap a little bit of blood inside the meat resulting in what is known as fiery carcass in the meat industry Google image search fiery carcass at your own risk but there should be hardly any blood left in here that liquid is known in the industry as Purge or weep or drip meat is like three quarters water and some of it is gonna gradually leak out as the vacuum packaging accumulates and retains every drop Purge is meat water with a number of proteins and dissolved solids in it we'll get back back to that there is some blood in this chicken and let's see if we can find it there when I sliced into that bone blood cells are made in the bone marrow which you would know if you've ever broken a raw Wishbone or something before technically that's not blood inside the bones it's just blood cells it's missing the number one component of whole True Blood which is of course plasma the watery portion of Blood let's keep looking for that real blood hey there's a couple of streaks of blood there under the breast a couple of vessels or nerves or something here's some kind of vessel near the wing joint that looks like blood to me lots of tiny little spots of blood that get trapped and couldn't make it out when the chicken was bled and there's probably microscopic quantities of blood still clinging inside the capillaries and other teeny tiny vessels that we can't even see regardless we can see that blood is just very different from the protein Laden water that comes out of meat saying they're the same is like saying that you know coffee and tea are the same I mean they're very very similar but just fundamentally different as is the delicious coffee that I get from Trade coffee sponsor of this video get a free bag of coffee with purchase right now at drinktrade.com regusia trade is a coffee subscription service that partners with dozens of top-rated independent Roasters all over the United States you tell them what kind of coffee you like you tell them how much of it you drink and then they curate a custom coffee feed that delivers right to your door bag after delicious surprising bag comes straight to you from the local business that roasted it recently all coffee is shipped within 48 Hours of being roasted and that makes a real difference and trade Works to make sure that the local roaster is sourcing their beans ethically as in the case of Alma here in Atlanta they actually have their own coffee Farm Family Farm in Honduras this is a very nutty darker roast than I normally get but I tell trade that I like a little bit of variety and this is some nice way to Shake It Up from the lighter roasts I normally get upgrade your morning routine with better coffee right now trade is offering you a free bag of coffee with any subscription at drinktrade.com regusia that's drinktrade.com regusia for a free bag of coffee with any subscription purchase thank you trade anyway let's talk about why Blood and meat juice are just different things both taste wise and functionally we're going to need some real blood to examine and because carcasses are bled so effectively at the slaughterhouse these days there's almost no butcher shop left in the United States where you can just buy like a pint of cow's blood or whatever the blood never makes it this far the slaughterhouse collects the blood from The Killing Floor and parts of it get used for pharmaceuticals parts of the blood get used for animal feed or plant fertilizer and In some cultures people eat the blood though rarely here in the states which is why if I want to show you some blood I have to draw my own gotta sterilize my skin and hey that ought to do it grab a medical grade Lancet and here we should get some actual blood the reason blood is so thick and Red is because it's only about half water blood is almost half red blood cells which are relatively big solid things actually the particular shape of blood cells makes it so that blood is very thick only when it is still when you kind of swirl the blood around or move it around in some way it thins out the red blood cells are very susceptible to shearing forces and so still blood is thick moving blood is thin and of course it starts to set up solid as soon as it touches air thanks to the platelets that make your blood clot to close wounds when you cook blood as in this pre-cooked English style blood sausage the blood sets up really firm into something like a cake in fact blood has albumin in it the same protein in eggs that coagulates at relatively gentle heat and that helps to hold your cake together the same protein is in blood and that makes blood an excellent thickener for Soups and stews and such you just stir a little bit of it into a simmering liquid like like a start slurry they do that in France this is a bowl of tofu and Duck's blood soup filmed somewhere in East Asia where eating blood is generally not considered taboo but it is taboo elsewhere most notably in abrahamic religious Traditions like Islam nobody knows where the blood-eating taboo came from historically at least but in the meat industry they refer to blood as liquid meat because it's nutritionally so similar to meat and it's just a safe to eat as long as you cook it I mean if you ate a whole lot of blood you could potentially get iron poisoning and that's one Theory as to where the blood taboo came from another hypothesis is that it might have had to do with a pagan animal sacrifice which was associated with blood drinking regardless a lot of people in this world regard blood eating with some amount of disgust and that's one reason why it matters that The Purge collected in this vacuum-packed beef is not blood even though it is very dark red beef has more of the particular Pro protein that tints meat juice red or pink or purple and that protein is myoglobin meat juice is mostly water with a little myoglobin mixed in now I've said that on the internet before in a tick tock video that I made a long time ago and apparently the audio from that video has gone kind of viral people dub it over their own videos of really really red juicy rare steaks that they're cutting up and that's cool but people comment on those videos and one thing that I see them saying is hmm water with a little myoglobin in it isn't that what blood is no no that is not blood the protein inside red blood cells that makes them red is hemoglobin myoglobin and hemoglobin are chemically similar though hemoglobin is four times the size they both contain heme which is the iron complex that binds to oxygen from your lungs the function of hemoglobin is to carry oxygen from your lungs down to your tissues the function of myoglobin is to store the that oxygen directly inside your muscle tissue inside the muscle cells myoglobin stores oxygen for future use by your muscles they are similar molecules but they just aren't the same stuff and there's normally no myoglobin found in blood one person on Tick Tock said wait a minute if there's no myoglobin in blood then why do they search for myoglobin in a standard medical blood test I'm guessing this person maybe worked at a lab or something and the answer is they look for myoglobin in your blood because it would be an indication of muscle injury that the fluid from inside your muscle is spilling out into your bloodstream due to some injury or something indeed when we injure an animal by slaughtering it for meat some residual blood probably does spill into that intramuscular water which in turn leaks out as Purge but there's probably very little blood in there and if you have a problem with trace blood in the juice then you've got a problem with meat there's trace blood in the meat too and no amount of washing or salting we'll get it out though probably there's so little blood that you'd never taste it the slightly metallic taste of red meat is mostly due to the high myoglobin content not Trace hemoglobin and cooking doesn't get rid of heme proteins it just changes their color to Brown and gray as in the case of this medium steak that I made for the kids we use the same color changing phenomenon to tell when chicken is cooked all the way through we say the juices should run clear which really means the juices should be translucent Brown instead of translucent pink chicken white meat has very little myoglobin because chickens don't fly very much so they don't actually use this chest muscle it just doesn't need much oxygen but even the dark red myoglobin juice from beef does not taste as powerfully metallic as blood does because there's proportionally way less heme protein in here compared to actual blood the juices just mostly water with a little bit of other stuff in it like I think those little white clumps under the microscope are free fats that clumped up in the cold of the fridge I think ultimately the biggest difference between blood and meat juice to me is that they just taste really different blood Cooks up really thick and has a powerful metallic taste that you know from like cutting your lip and stuff meat juice is very very thin and it has hardly any metallic taste at all it mostly just tastes like meat so there you go that's why a rare steak is not a bloody steak or at least it is little more bloody than any other piece of meat that liquid is juice and the difference matters

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,034,076

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Id: gLvQzwjI-IM

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023