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Wednesday, September 12, 2007

thinking about quite a number of food quite lately. haha.
some pre exams symptoms?

had island creamery icecream ytd :D

STEAK. jack's place. lol.
yesterday the fish and chips from fish and co.
i am bored-
some interesting article abt steak here :D KNOW WHAT YOU EAT.
well, the calories for some but then there are still other things out there.

just to find out this: The Not-So-Simple Joys of Steak
Cows can be complicated.

Ah, the joy of a simple steak dinner. A piece of meat plus a source of heat. Whether you’re headed for your backyard grill or the best steakhouse in town, that’s all you need to know, right?

Wrong.

Steak, seemingly the most elementary of meats, is complicated indeed.

A chicken breast comes from a chicken breast. But a steak can show up in the front, back or middle of a cow, depending on whether it's delmonico, ribeye, round, rump, sirloin or skirt. Or a porterhouse, t-bone, bottom round or hanger.

And we’re just getting warmed up. Consider the maddening multitude of names for the very same cut. That’s not just a New York strip steak reclining by your baked potato. It’s a Kansas City, an ambassador, a boneless club and an entrecote all rolled into one.

You order an "entrecote" at your local Outback Steakhouse, people will think you don’t know your elbow from your Angus.

Next, ponder the top three USDA grades: Prime, Choice and Select. And the bottom end of the grading scale, Cutter and Canner (or, that mystery meat in your frozen burrito).

Grain-fed vs. grass-fed; wet aging vs. dry aging vs. no aging at all. Who can remember whether Choice is better than Select? It’s enough to make you give up and order a pork chop.

The kindest cuts
But wait, there’s more. Tenderness is a big buzzword in the steak biz, and there’s a techie way to measure it. The beef industry uses something called the Warner-Bratzler shear force test on core samples of cooked steaks to determine the amount of force, in pounds, needed to slice a particular cut.

The winners? According to the Cattlemen’s Beef Board, the top loin, bone-in strip, bone-in ribeye, t-bone and porterhouse steaks had the lowest shear-force values, which means you won’t throw your back out trying to cut them.

And to help your herd to do well on the Warner-Bratzler, an enterprising biotech offers DNA testing for cattle so ranchers can figure out which ones are going to produce the most succulent offspring. So much for Mother Nature.

We figure if you want a really great steak, you just need to follow this advice. First, demand USDA Prime, expensive and sometimes hard to find but well worth your trouble. Shell out the extra bucks for a porterhouse, a cut that includes the marvelously flavorful top loin and the soft, smooth tenderloin.

Next: Nix on the steak sauce. A couple of twists of black pepper is all the seasoning you need for a fine hunk o’ beef.

Finally, order it rare. Medium rare at the very most.

Ask for medium well or, God forbid, well done, and your Prime porterhouse is going to have all the flavor and tenderness of a Western saddle.

haha so much about me learning about the cows last year.

put papaya to tenderize the cow meat as they contain enzymes which breaks down those connective tissues. oh no. does that mean that papaya can be potentially dangerous?
[or maybe i remember wrongly.]
haha.

am kinda nuts after sudoku-on-paper.

zzz.

back to econs! adieus-