- Have you ever made burgers
with store bought ground beef? With some pressing and squishing you can get that
meat into a patty, but when you cook it and
then go to take a bite, it's tough, not tender. Why is that and how
do we prevent it? We need to harness
the power of myosin. (upbeat music) Burgers, sausage and meatballs are all made with ground meat, but their textures
are pretty different, and you might think the reason for that difference
is their ingredients. And you're not wrong,
but the mixing method, it really matters too. Why is that? Meat fibers are composed
of a number of proteins, one of which is called myosin. You can think of
myosin as a little tube with some spikes
sticking out the sides and those little spikes
help it to grab onto stuff. Kind of like Velcro. When you cut or grind meat, myosin is more easily freed
from the muscle fibers. In the kitchen, this is
called myosin development. Now, once myosin is
freed, it acts like a glue and it can grab onto
water, fat and oil, even other proteins, and it'll hold onto
them even when heated. No matter what you're making, you need the proper amount
of myosin development. First, let's get
back to burgers. The first recipe
I ever made at ATK was Brian Roof's
pub style burgers, and I've got that
set up right here. This is two pounds
of beef sirloin that I have cut into
half inch pieces. I went ahead and froze this
meat after spreading it out. It froze for 35 minutes
and the meat is firm, but not frozen. I'm gonna grind
this not in three, not in five, but four batches. I will use about 35 pulses,
probably one second pulses, if I know Brian to do this. what I'm looking for
is meat that is about maybe exactly one
16th of an inch large. (food processor pulsing) Did I lose-? Where are we? Don't tell Brian. I'm not gonna dig out a ruler,
but this looks pretty good. I'm just gonna keep processing
the rest of this beef. So I have my meat divided into
four portions ready to shape, but this seems like a lot to go through to
make burgers right? Why is Brian making us
go through all of this? Turns out he knows a thing
or two about burgers. So when you're making burgers
from store bought ground meat, that meat has been really
processed, maybe ground twice. Way more than what
I've done here. And what that means is there's
a lot of myosin available to grab onto the
rest of the meat. When you go to cook that burger, it really tightens
up and it eats tough. In fact, if you notice
a lot of recipes have you dimple a burger
patty before you cook it. That's to account for the
buckling that the myosin causes. What I really love
about Brian's method is the beef is
treated so delicately that very little
myosin is released that keeps the burgers
nice and tender. They're just really
good, worth the work. I'm just kind of gently
pressing everything together. You'll notice I'm
not dimpling these. Again, that's because they're
so little myosin development that I'm not worried about
them buckling when I cook. Great. Now I'm gonna season
these burgers mostly with salt. A little bit of pepper on the
surface too 'cause why not? I like to use kosher
salt for this. I think you can kind
of feel the crystals a little bit better
and have a better idea of how much is falling
from your fingers. Time to cook. I'm gonna cook these burgers
over high heat in a skillet two minutes per side just
to get some nice color and then I'll finish them
in a 300 degree oven, taking them to 125
degrees for medium rare and then we're done. All right, burgers done. Time to eat. Brian, I'm sorry
I made fun of you. This burger's delicious. It's got so much
flavor, it's so tender. It almost falls apart in
a really, really good way. All because we were very
careful to make sure we weren't developing
very much mycin, just the bare minimum to
hold that meat together. Minimal handling is
just one strategy for preventing myosin
from toughening food. If you look at
recipes for meatloaf, you'll see that they
contain aponad or cheese, or sometimes both. Those ingredients are kind
of just keeping myosin from grabbing onto all the meat. Then the food doesn't
cook up tight. Myosin development
isn't always bad though. In fact, it's really
important for a lot of foods. My colleague Steve
Dunn has a recipe for a sweet Italian
bulk sausage. It's not cased into
those familiar links, but it's the same stuff. It starts with some pork
butt that's been cleaned up and to this I'm going
to add some salt. I'm also gonna add
some seasonings. There's some whole
fennel seed in here, little sugar, some spices. You can get the full recipe
at cooksillustrated.com. I'm just gonna use
my hands for this, but I wanna mix this
so that that mixture is really well seasoned. The salt, it's actually
gonna help extract myosin from the meat
and that is step one to making a good sausage. Now that this is well mixed, I am gonna cover it and
pop it in the fridge. It's gonna sit in the fridge for anywhere between
eight hours to two days. After that rest in the fridge, I'm gonna take this pork, spread it out onto a
rimmed baking sheet. That sheet's gonna go into the
freezer for 35 to 55 minutes, and what I'm looking
for is for these chunks to be firm but not frozen, kind of like the
beef for the burgers. I wanna make sure that
fat is nice and cold so that it doesn't
melt as I'm grinding. I have my partially
frozen pork here. It is very firm but not so firm that I can't squish it if I try. I'm using a meat
grinder for this, but you could use a food
processor if you want. The goal here is to
process this a lot more than what we were
doing with the burgers. (grinder motor whirring) As this meat is
getting processed, I'm really cutting all
of those muscle fibers pretty aggressively. That's gonna help with
my myosin development. There's a lot of friction, and so that's why
everything is cold. I have frozen the grinder parts. I have my bowl of ice
to keep the meat cold after it lands in the bowl. That's to keep the
fat from melting out. Now it's time to mix the pork, and when I say mix
I really mean mix. All of that salting
and grinding, It's developed a good amount
of myosin but not quite enough. This mixing action where
I'm just kind of folding and smearing this
mixture across the sides in the bottom of the bowl, it's pulling more
myosin from those fibers and we really need that because sausage gets its snappy springy
texture from the myosin. This looks pretty good. It's nice and tacky. It's sticking to
itself and the bowl, that's cause of the myosin. That's sausage. I'm just gonna shape
a couple of these into patties and cook 'em off. This recipe makes about
two pounds of bulk sausage and you can do any
number of things with it, whether it's cooking some
off and eating it right away. Sausage, egg and
cheese sandwiches, putting it in a red
sauce, a meatloaf, whatever you want,
but enough talk. Let's give this a try. It's sweet, it's fennelly and it's got that
characteristic snap that you expect
in a good sausage. You find that in dumplings, whether we're talking
har gow, shumai, they all have that lovely snap because of moderate
myosin development. What happens when we
crank that dial up and go For maximal
myosin development? I'm gonna make
lion's head meatballs and this recipe was
developed by Annie Petito. Now these meatballs, they're
from the Xinjiang region in eastern China and they
call for ground pork. Most store bought ground meat, whether we're talking
about this pork or ground beef, turkey, chicken, it's probably been ground twice. That first grinding kind
of breaks everything up. The second one mixes the
meat so that they have a really uniform grind
and proportionate evenly. All of that processing,
it really develops myosin. This is a little
bit tacky already, but it's not quite enough. We're gonna add a little
bit of salt to this to help draw out
more of that myosin. I also have a little
bit of baking soda that's gonna keep these
meatballs moist as they cook and a little bit of water. That water is just to
help disperse the solids. The pork goes into this bowl. I'll give this a quick
toss just to help disperse the salt
and baking soda. Next, the flavorings and
a little bit of binder. I've got one egg, some
soy sauce, shàox+ng wine, grated ginger, minced
scallion whites, sugar, and white pepper. To further develop mycin, I'm
gonna skip using my hands. I can't do as good
of a job mixing this and kneading that mixture
as the stand mixer can. So here we go. (mixer motor whirring) So what I'm looking for
here is for this mixture to lighten in color slightly, become tacky and stiff, usually takes 45 to 60 seconds. All right, this looks great. Time to shape. You can see kind
of how tacky it is and how it sticks to itself. It looks kind of
like a pate almost. In order to work with this, I'm actually going to
lightly moisten my palms with just a little bit of water. That myosin in the meatballs, it's gonna stick to the
water instead of my hands. You can see how
tacky this looks, and that's because all
that grinding and mixing, it pulled out as much
myosin as possible, and that's really important for the texture of
these meatballs. I'll finish shaping
the rest of these. Get some broth going
and we'll cook 'em off. I've got four cups
of chicken broth here in this Dutch oven and it's just come up to a boil. Gonna shut this off and I'll
get my meatballs in here. This pork was super
finely ground. That means the fat and
that pork as we cook, it could be prone
to melting away, and leaving our meatballs
kind of dry and sad. That's not gonna happen
because of the myosin. It's tacky gluey nature
allows it to hold onto all of that fat as well
as the liquid we added. Even though I'm gonna
simmer these for an hour, and then take 'em out and cook
them for another half hour, they're gonna stay moist
and tender and juicy. So here they are, my
lions head meatballs and they look great. One of the things I
love about this meatball is it's really tender. In fact, it's so tender, you
can cut it with chopsticks. The reason I could do this, even though we really
tried to develop as much myosin as possible, myosin has another role. It's an emulsifier. It holds on to all that
water we added in the form of the rice wine, the
soy sauce, the egg even. It also holds on to all
that finely ground fat, and that water and fat, They keep the meatball tender, even through all that
myosin development, even through all that
cooking and the results? This is just melt in
your mouth tender. They're so good. When you're working
with ground meat, whether it's beef, poultry,
pork, or even seafood, myosin development is critical. So the next time
you're at a cookout or enjoying lion's
head meatballs, remember your friend myosin. What's your favorite recipe where myosin development
is really important? Let me know in the
comments below, like this video and subscribe. And for more cool
recipes and techniques, check out cooksillustrated.com.
