Curious Cook

A hot-water bath for thawing meats (New York Times)

EVEN in kitchens where fresh is king, the freezer remains a handy tool. There’s no easier way to deal with a bounty of meat from a big-box store or a butchering class or a C.S.A. share, or the haul from a fishing trip, or the unpredictable sighting of partridge and other rare birds in the Chinese market. In my house, the freezer is essential for drawing out the enjoyment of the prime mail-order meats that my mother sends for my birthday, and that arrive rock-hard under a block of dry ice.

Less handy, however, is the thawing process, which often requires planning a day or more ahead of the cooking. Food thaws slowly in the refrigerator, especially when kept in its plastic packaging, which is the method recommended by purveyors and the Department of Agriculture to minimize bacterial growth and the loss of juices. Thawing in cold water, 40 degrees or below, is safe and much faster — water transfers heat far more efficiently than air — but it can still take hours. I’ve never had much luck with the defrost setting on microwave ovens, which can start to cook one part of the food while the rest is still frozen.

Now there’s good news for last-minute cooks. It turns out that we can thaw frozen steaks and other compact cuts in as little as 10 minutes, without compromising their quality, and with very little effort. All you need is hot water.

This information comes, surprisingly, from research sponsored by the Department of Agriculture, though the methods aren’t yet officially recommended. The studies have been published in the Journal of Food Science and in Food Control.

At the U.S.D.A. labs in Beltsville, Md., Janet S. Eastridge and Brian C. Bowker test-thawed more than 200 one-inch-thick beef strip loin steaks in three different groups: some in a refrigerator at 37 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, some in a constantly circulating water bath at 68 degrees, and some in a water bath at 102 degrees.

Air-thawing in the refrigerator took 18 to 20 hours, while the room-temperature water bath thawed the steaks in about 20 minutes, and the hot-summer-day bath in 11 minutes. These water-bath times are so short that any bacterial growth would remain within safe limits.

The water-thawed steaks actually leaked less juice than the air-thawed steaks. The researchers grilled the steaks, too, and found that all the thawed steaks lost about 26 percent of their original weight once cooked, while never-frozen steaks lost 21 percent. The study found no significant differences in tenderness between slow- and quick-thawed steaks.

Eleven minutes is pretty quick, but Brian A. Nummer and colleagues at Utah State University in Logan shaved away another couple of minutes by heating the water bath to 140 degrees, the standard temperature of steam tables in food service kitchens.

The Utah State group found that chicken breasts about a half-inch thick thawed in a little more than 3 minutes, and inch-thick breasts in less than 9 minutes. Although 140-degree water would eventually cook the chicken to medium-rare, they saw no signs of cooking. The quick-thawed breasts did lose slightly more juice than the refrigerator-thawed breasts, but when the chicken was grilled and served, a panel of 18 tasters was unable to tell them apart. And based on their mathematical modeling, the researchers concluded that any bacterial growth would remain well within safe limits.

So there’s no downside to quick-thawing steaks, chops, fillets and other relatively thin cuts in warm water right before cooking. Large roasts are a different story. They take long enough to thaw that there may be time for significant bacterial growth on their surfaces. Prompt cooking might well eliminate that problem, but until this has been studied, it’s safest to continue thawing roasts in the refrigerator or in water under 40 degrees.

Quick-thawing is easy to adopt in the home kitchen. But don’t expect your thaw times to match the lab times I’ve quoted unless you have an immersion circulator or another method to keep the water in motion and at a constant temperature. If the water is still, a cold zone develops around the food and insulates it from the remaining warm water. And without infusions of hot water or heat from a burner, the icy food cools the water bath.

Unless I’m in a rush, I’m happy to let the thawing proceed more slowly on its own while I take care of other tasks. I fill a large pot with 125-degree water from the tap, immerse the plastic-wrapped meat, weigh it down with a slotted spoon to keep it under water and stir the water occasionally. The water temperature drops, but stays above 100 degrees for a half-hour or so, depending on how much food is thawing.

Last week, I thawed 2-inch-thick filets mignons in an hour, whole squab in 40 minutes, a 1-pound whole fish in 20 minutes, and 1 ¼-inch-thick salmon fillets in 15 minutes. Thawing times can vary, depending on the volume, temperature and movement of the water as well as the food’s thickness and how it’s wrapped. (A lot of plastic swaddling interferes with heat transfer. It’s best to remove it and place the food in a thin resealable plastic bag, partly immersing it to force the air out before zipping it shut.)

So when you scan your larder to improvise a quick meal, don’t forget to look in the freezer. The makings of the main course may be just minutes away.

June 8, 2011

Copyright 2011 The New York Times

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Thawing meats in minutes

In this Wednesday's Curious Cook column I write about using a pot of hot water to thaw steaks, chicken breasts, and fish in minutes, rather than the few hours required in cold water or the many hours in a refrigerator. According to recent research funded by the USDA, rapid thawing can minimize the freeze-thaw damage to meat tissues, and taste panels couldn't tell the difference between meats that had been cooked after gradual or quick thawing.

_____________________

Eastridge, J.S. and   B.C. Bowker. Effect of rapid thawing on the meat quality attributes of USDA Select beef strip loin steaks. Journal of Food Science 2011, 76: S156-S162.
doi 10.1111/j.1750-3841.2010.02037.x

Shrestha, S. et al., Sensory quality and food safety of boneless chicken breast portions thawed rapidly by submersion in hot water. Food Control 2009, 20: 706-08.
doi 10.1016/j.foodcont.2008.09.011

Curious Cook in the New York Times: Smoky ribs without the fire

In my June 30 Curious Cook column, I write about the challenges of genuinely low and slow cooking on home grills, and provide a recipe for reliably moist ribs cooked in the oven, with smokiness provided by pimentón chilli powder.

Many readers have pointed out that simple rib racks help keep more than one slab suitably distant from the hot flames or coals. This is true, and the column would have been better for having included that option.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: American dry-cured hams, country and European-style

In Wednesday's Curious Cook column I write about the new wave of fine American hams, cured with salt and eaten uncooked, like Spanish jamón iberico and serrano and Italian prosciutto.

Last month I attended the 5th World Congress of Dry-cured Hams, which was held in the Spanish town of Aracena, near Sevilla. I enjoyed some remarkable jamón there and learned a great deal from producers, scientists, and ham lovers. I'll be writing more about this later on.

In the meantime, if you like ham and haven't read David Arnold's brief and brilliant treatise on the subject, published a couple of years ago in Food Arts, get it here. It's packed with information and beautifully written.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: To brine or not to brine the turkey

In this week's Curious Cook column I write about how brining produces a moister roast, why I still don't like to brine the Thanksgiving turkey, and how to moisten the turkey breast after cooking it, not before.

Curious Cook in the New York Times: The red-meat miracle and other tales from the butcher case

My column in today's New York Times food section is about the redness of red meats and how it's maintained in both fresh and cured cuts. Check back for some other interesting findings about meat pigments and nitrites.

Note added on April 18: the column contains an error. In the sentence

Nitrite reacts in the meat tissue to form nitrous oxide, which bonds firmly to the iron in myoglobin and stabilizes it.

"nitrous oxide" should be "nitric oxide."

Nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, is N2O, and nitric oxide is NO.

My thanks to Professor Douglas T. Hess of the Duke University Medical Center for pointing this out--just hours after publication!

_____________________________________

Huang, Y.-R. et al. Change of hygienic quality and freshness in tuna treated with electrolyzed water and carbon monoxide gas during fresh and frozen storage. Journal of Food Science 2006, vol. 71 no. 4, M127-33.

Sorheim, O. et al. Carbon monoxide as a colorant in cooked or fermented sausages. Journal of Food Science 2006, vol. 71 no. 9, C549-55.

Kim, Y. H. et al. Mechanism for lactate-color stabilization in injection-enhanced beef. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2006, 54, 7856-62.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf061225h

Sebranek, J. and J. Bacus. Natural and organic cured meat products: regulatory, manufacturing, marketing, quality and safety issues. American Meat Science Association, White Paper Series, number 1, March 2007.

Moller, J.K.S. et al. Mass spectrometric evidence for a zinc-porphyrin complex as the red pigment in dry-cured Iberian and Parma ham. Meat Science 2007, 75, 203-210

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2006.07.005

Wakamatsu, J. et al. Direct demonstration of the presence of zinc in the acetone-extractable red pigment from parma ham. Meat Science 2007, 76, 385-87.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2006.12.006

Gleanings for Thanksgiving: turkeys and sweet potatoes

From a quick survey of recent advances in turkey science, it looks as though producers still have a lot to learn about processing their birds to give them the best cooking qualities--so that cooks have at least a fighting chance of making a tender, succulent roast.

Grass-Fed Beef vs. Farmed Salmon

My post last August about the weak claim of grass-fed beef to healthful quantities of omega-3 fatty acids has drawn a skeptical response from Robert Buxbaum, who found a contrary view in Michael Pollan's important new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I'd like to dissect the discussion a bit, because I think it's a cautionary example of how easily speculations about food and nutrition can stray from the facts, become accepted as fact themselves, and end up being unintentionally misleading.

Good Fats In Grass-Fed Beef?

My friend Daniel Patterson, the chef and owner of Coi in San Francisco, recently told me that some of his meat suppliers have been promoting grass-fed beef as a good source of healthful omega-3 fatty acids, both the linolenic acid found in walnuts and canola oil, and the very long chain fatty acids characteristic of fish oils. Beef, the archetype of foods laden with cholesterol-raising saturated fats, as a health food? I took a fresh look at the numbers.

Sure enough, grass-fed beef has substantially more omega-3 fatty acids than conventional beef raised on grain or a combination of grain and other concentrated nutrients. This makes sense: green grass doesn’t have much fat or oil, but its membranes are rich in linolenic acid. When the grass is cut and turned into hay, the linolenic acid tends to be oxidized and converted into other molecules, so hay is a poorer source, and grains contain little or no linolenic acid.

Once it gets into cattle, the grass linolenic acid meets several fates. Much of it is hydrogenated by microbes in the animal’s rumen, and turned into more saturated, less valuable fatty acids. Some of it enters intact into the circulation, and ends up being deposited in both muscle and milk. And a small portion of it is converted by the cattle tissues into the longer-chain fatty acids found in abundance in fish.

So is grass-fed beef a meaningful source of omega-3s? No. An entire grass-fed beefsteak contains hundredths of a gram of long-chain omega-3s, and less than a quarter of a gram of linolenic acid. You can get the same quantities from a couple of walnut pieces and a few grams—a very small bite—of salmon or oyster. Beef is wonderful stuff, and grass-fed beef is especially lean and flavorful, but it’s still beef. 

Dannenberger, D. et al., J. Agric. Food Chem. 2004, 52 (21) 6607