These Photos Will Make You Cry
posted in Shaping Up, kitchen |Jaden’s Steamy Kitchen’s post on how to improve the quality of your meat with a handful, no, two handfuls, of salt has hunger inducing photos of delicious looking steak.
The secret is salt. And like Alton Brown, she recommends Kosher (or sea) salt. Because when you put this much salt onto a piece of meat, you don’t want to taste the iodine. Basically, take your hunk of cow (or buffalo, or pig, or chicken) flesh, and cover it in enough un-iodized salt that you cannot see the color of the meat. Turn it over, and do it again. Let the salt sit on the meat for one hour for each inch that the meat is thick. One and a half inches thick? Let the meat rest for ninety minutes.
Rinse the meat extraordinarily well and pat very dry. Then cook.
Jaden also includes some diagrams of what she believes is happening; basically, the salt sucks the water out of the meat, creating “wet salt” on the surface of the meat. Then, because some of the salt has dissolved into the water that was sucked out of the meat, and there is no salt in the meat, osmosis takes the salt back into the meat. Her explanation of how the salt turns the proteins in the meat from “tight-assed stuck up” to “totally relaxed, fun loving” is priceless.
She even encourages you to mix some spices in with the salt, so they get pulled back into the meat like Christina Aguilera’s entourage.
It sounds absolutely nummy, but because of weight watchers, I may have to avoid her tip of topping freshly cooked beef with garlic butter.
