Methods of Cooking: How to Choose?

well hello there everybody Jacob Burton here from Stella culinary comm and today we'll be discussing how to choose a proper cooking technique and a question that I get quite often is how do I know what cooking technique to use and win and being able to understand and answer this question for yourself is extremely important because no matter how well executed a given technique is if you're applying that technique to the unappropriate product in the first place then you're going to get negative results no matter how good you are so to understand first how to apply cooking techniques on how to choose a cooking technique you must first understand the product and just fruits and vegetables are fairly straightforward you can watch our whole kitchen prep series we have a lot of different video techniques on how to prep vegetables but for the most part your peeling and blanching it's not a big deal what really throws people for a loop is animal Anatomy and here we have a cow we're going to be discussing of the different cuts of animal just real briefly just enough to give us a foundation for choosing an appropriate cooking technique because when you go to the store when you purchase a protein when you purchase a piece of meat the first question that you need to ask yourself when planning to apply a cooking method is is this a tough cut or a tender cut and the answer to that question will dictate the final cooking technique that you apply so the tough cuts of meats come from the extremities of the animal the farther out towards the service of animal that you get generally speaking the more tough those cuts are so in the front portion here of the animal of the count you have the chuck in the brisket in the shank the chuck is where you get things like your short rib and your pot roast very flavorful but if cooked improperly can become extremely chewy also your brisket where of course you're getting your barbecue brisket corned beef your shank if you cross cut your shank you're getting osso bucco again all very flavorful cuts of meat but extremely tough if you don't apply the proper cooking technique then you have the middle section or the belly portion and the belly portion is where you get bacon from a pig in this case the flank is where you're cutting things like flank steaks and skirt steaks so this is an a super tough region of the animal but it's not where you get your free tender cuts either somewhere in between then you have the rear of the animal were the round and some more shanks are and from that round you can have the rump roast but really what a lot of people are after when they're talking about premium steaks and our premium cuts of beef is this middle section right here this sweet spot and this is where you're going to fabricate your things like your filet mignons and your New York and your prime rib your porterhouse or t-bone they all come from this area of the animal and they're all considered tender cuts of meat with some being more tender than others and the most tender being the tenderloin itself and you'll see right in front of the round right which is at the rear of the animal right from the round below the sirloin and above the top sirloin is the tenderloin and the Tenderloin is prized for its tenderness among steak eaters because it's a very lazy muscle it doesn't really do much just kind of sits there isolated and protected by all these exterior muscles now what happens is the more work a muscle has to do like the legs like the breast right all these muscles are used to move the animal around and give it mobility the more the more that muscle is use the more strength it must have and the more structural integrity it must have and that structural integrity comes from a connective tissue called collagen and this collagen is what makes your meat super super chewy but what happens is if you apply heat and time to this collagen collagen is really nothing more than a triple helix of gelatin so what happens is over time when the appropriate heat is applied that collagen unravels into its three separate strands of gelatin making that piece of meat that was once super tough and chewy now tender now what you want to do is take this knowledge and apply it to your choice of cooking techniques and the way I like to think of this is I like to draw a square with four quadrants in it and you really have two ways of applying heat or temperature and then you also have two ways of applying time so for applying heat you can either apply moist heat or you can apply dry heat now applying time you can either cook it slow or you can cook it fast pretty simple right and so what happens is every single cooking technique out there is going to fall into one of these four quadrants any technique that falls into the slow quadrant and we have to slow quadrants we have a slow and moist and slow and dry this is going to be reserved for tough cuts of meat right and anything that falls into the fast and moist or the fast and dry category these are going to be your tender cuts of meat so to put this into perspective let's start filling out these quadrants are moist and slow contains techniques like braising stewing and soo V and soo V you can kind of own little magical technique that we'll talk a lot more about in the future now braising stewing ensue V and su v--'s con breaks the rule because you can pretty much do V just about anything but braising a student in general you're going to use these techniques for things like short ribs and a corn beef pork butt lamb shank osso bucco all these tough cuts and you're applying gentle moist heat over a long period of time it's breaking that collagen down unraveling that triple helix of gelatin and making that cut tender now in the dry and slow quadrant we have things like roasting smoking which is BBQ right confit which is basically just oil poaching or poaching and fat and the cuts of meat that you normally would use these techniques for are things like leg of lamb brisket duck confit just barbecue in general I mean the whole genre of barbecue for the most part of taking tough cuts of meat and then applying smoke at a very low temperature over a long period of time again breaking down that collagen and making that tough cut of meat tender and very flavorful now in the fast and moist category you have boiling and simmering and boiling and simmering are usually reserved for things like vegetables especially blanching or root vegetables you're not going to be seeing a lot of people boil or simmer meats and if they do they're not really turning out that well steaming steaming again is is very a fast-paced moist cooking method usually applied to a shellfish things like that anything that has a barrier you want some sort of barrier when using steam if you apply if you apply the steam directly to meet for the most part it's not going to cook that evenly and then you have poaching which you can poach a chicken breast you can poach a piece of fish but because you're using water and because you're using a tender cut of meat you're still poaching at a fairly relatively fast pace I mean poaching a piece of fish at you know 160 180 degrees Fahrenheit only takes you know 4 to 5 minutes so the kinds of cuts that you would use for a fast and moist cooking method or your vegetables what you're going to boil your fish which you can poach or steamed and your chicken breast which you can also poach and steamed and these are just a few examples that I'm throwing out here now for the fast and dry methods you can use roasting and baking and these are two different techniques but the very commonly interchange and we'll talk more about this in the future grilling either over a gas or hot coals is a great way to cook a tender cut of meat searing I mean think like an ahi steak or a piece of or just a beautiful steak in general a searing at a high temperature also sauteing and stir frying frying in general whether you're deep fat frying or your pan frying are great for tender cuts of meat and broiling as well and broiling is basically upside-down grilling and when you're applying these dry and fast cooking methods you're going to apply and airily the cuts of meat or various products such as fish again vegetables but vegetables are great grilled great roasted great sauteed poultry you can roast or bake or grill steaks you can broil grill all that good stuff and then of course the loin which the loin of the animal is the most tender region so you'll generally going to use a dry and fast cooking method like grilling like searing like sauteing for things like beef tenderloin pork tenderloin lamb loin lamb loin chops all that good stuff now we will be talking a lot more about these individual cooking techniques in their own videos in the future but this video was more just as sort of lay out the guide of how you would go about thinking about these cooking techniques and how you'd actually choose them now if you're watching this video 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Channel: Jacob Burton

Views: 264,372

Keywords: cooking food, culinary school, how-to, methods, techniques

Id: mBT5O3OXXkY

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2012