Primary Topic
This episode explores the science behind achieving perfectly smoked barbecue by cooking "low and slow," focusing on chemical reactions that transform tough cuts into tender delights.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Optimal Cooking Temperature: Keeping the smoker between 225 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit is crucial for the best results.
- Collagen to Gelatin Transformation: Low and slow cooking transforms tough collagen into soft gelatin, making the meat tender.
- Moisture and Bark Formation: Proper moisture control is essential for forming the 'bark', a tasty crust on the meat, without drying it out.
- Wood and Smoke: Using the right wood and maintaining minimal visible smoke contributes to a subtle, enhanced flavor.
- Chemical Reactions at Play: Understanding the chemistry behind meat smoking can lead to better preparation and cooking results.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction to Smoking Meat
Overview of smoking as both an art and a science. Key topics include the basics of meat smoking and the journey of pitmaster George Loving. George Loving: "It's the epitome of smoking because it takes the longest."
2: The Science of Meat Transformation
Discussion on how the cooking process affects meat at a molecular level, focusing on proteins like collagen and myosin. Matt Hardings: "The magic of low and slow is that it breaks up collagen into gelatin."
3: Perfecting the Process
Insights into achieving the perfect smoked meat through temperature control and understanding the Maillard reaction. Matt Hardings: "Maillard reaction makes all these crunchy, savory, flavor-enhanced things."
Actionable Advice
- Select the Right Cut: Opt for cuts with higher collagen for smoking, such as brisket or pork shoulder.
- Equipment Check: Ensure you have a reliable smoker that can maintain consistent low temperatures.
- Wood Selection: Choose wood with appropriate lignin content for the desired flavor, like mesquite for a stronger aroma.
- Temperature Monitoring: Keep a steady hand in managing the fire and smoke to maintain the ideal cooking temperature.
- Patience is Key: Allow the meat to cook thoroughly without rushing, sometimes up to 16 hours for perfect tenderness.
About This Episode
Perfecting your grilling technique ahead of the Fourth of July? Chefs will tell you that cooking is not just an art — it's a science. And the spirit of summer barbecues, NPR science correspondent Sydney Lupkin brings us this encore piece about how understanding the chemistry of cooking meat can help you perfect your barbeque. It's all about low and slow cooking.
People
George Loving, Matt Hardings, Sydney Lupkin
Books
Chemistry in Your Kitchen by Matt Hardings
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
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Sydney Lupkin
You're listening to short wave from NPR.
Hi, short waivers. I'm Sydney Lupkin, NPR pharmaceuticals correspondent, in for Emily and Regina today. And bringing you something way off my usual beat.
George Loving
We got two cases, so about 160 pounds of pork butts that we're getting ready to throw in a smoker.
Sydney Lupkin
That's right. Smoking meat, that is, smoking means cooking at low temperatures for a long time. And it turns out smoking isn't just an art, it's a science.
George loving got into smoking meat while tailgating at his son's football games.
George Loving
We went to college. I said, you know, I'm gonna get one of those big smokers made and pull it behind my truck. Just tailgate in the parking lot.
And somebody said, george, why don't you, you know, do it as a business?
Sydney Lupkin
And that's how smoked at barbecue catering was born in Washington, DC.
George says brisket, the lower chest of the cow, is one of his favorite cuts.
George Loving
It's the epitome of smoking because it takes the longest. You put it in the smoker and you just let it cook.
You always want to stay around that 225 to 250.
Sydney Lupkin
So a good barbecue is juicy. It practically melts in your mouth, and it has that smoky flavor with a bit of char. And it's not something I've ever pulled off myself because achieving that magic requires, for one, equipment I don't have in my apartment. But it also takes a long time cooking at low temperatures.
George Loving
I've seen some briskets cook in eight to 10 hours. I've seen some take 14, 16 hours. It's something you just don't rush. And when it's done, it's done.
Sydney Lupkin
Today on the show, a meat metamorphosis, the chemistry behind transforming a tough cut of meat into juicy deliciousness. I'm Sidney Lupkin, and you're listening to short wave from NPR.
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Sydney Lupkin
Okay, so you've gone to the supermarket, picked out your favorite cut of meat. Let's stick with brisket, and you're ready to get smoking. The first thing to remember is that cooking is really a bunch of chemical reactions that is taking substances and changing them. By combining them with other substances, applying heat, gloopy cake batter turns into firm, fluffy cake. Raw eggs become opaque, and raw meat can be turned into really tasty barbecue. So let's get into it. Meat is muscle, and in muscle, there are a lot of proteins.
Matt Hardings
And we learned in high school biology that the proteins in our muscles are actin and myosin. Right? That's what helps us to flex and move around and do all these things.
And so every cut of meat has actin and myosin in it, no matter what.
Sydney Lupkin
That's Matt Hardings. He's a chemist at American University, and he wrote a book called Chemistry in your kitchen. He says the tougher cuts of meat also have another protein called collagen.
Matt Hardings
The purpose of collagen in our muscles is to make them resistant to strain. All these cuts of meat that have lots of collagen, they are coming from proteins and animals that are constantly moving, right? So the legs of a cow, right? Chicken legs. Chicken thighs have more collagen than chicken breast. And so the way we cook those cuts of meat reflects the amount of collagen that they have in them.
Sydney Lupkin
Collagen is basically shaped like a coil or a spring. Cooking on low heat over a long time gently uncoils it.
Matt Hardings
The magic of low and slow is that when you cook collagen the right way, it breaks up into gelatin, and gelatin makes Jell O, right. And you go from something really firm and chewy and not appetizing at all to fall apart, tenderead.
Sydney Lupkin
This is the chemistry lesson at the heart of making really good smoked meat. Break down the collagen by cooking the meat for a long time at low temperature. Like Matt said, it's what smoking experts call low and slow.
Matt Hardings
What you're trying to do with the low and slow is really take a very tough cut of meat and making it melt in your mouth.
You're really going to be cooking that piece of meat over 12 hours. Keeping your fire going for that amount of time for a brisket takes a real steady hand and a lot of patience.
Sydney Lupkin
Low and slow isn't just about breaking down collagen proteins. It also helps keep the meat from drying out.
Matt Hardings
So moisture control is another place where you need to be very patient and have a nice steady hand. If the temperature gets too high, you are going to dehydrate your meat a little bit, right? All of that water is going to come out, and all the muscle fibers are going to pack tighter and tighter and tighter with one another.
Sydney Lupkin
On the other hand, you also don't want your cooking chamber to be too moist either. Or something called bark doesn't form. And no, it's not tree bark, but it bears some resemblance to it. Bark is the tasty crust that forms on the outside or surface of the meat, a kind of browning, and it needs just the right amount of moisture to form.
Matt Hardings
So the bark is a product of the Maillard reaction. The Maillard reaction is likely my favorite chemical reaction. And what that is is a reaction between a sugar and a protein. Lots of our foods have sugars and proteins in them. And so anytime you see any sort of browning while you cook something, that is the Maillard reaction.
But Maillard reaction makes all these crunchy, savory, flavor enhanced things.
So when we get that Maillard reaction, that crispy, crunchy savoriness, it just makes our food taste so much better.
Sydney Lupkin
Now, what about the actual smoke in smoking meat? If you're cooking with wood, you want to make sure the smoke is barely visible. White, billowy smoke is no good because it gives the meat a harsh, smoky taste. So it all comes back again to cooking low and slow.
Matt Hardings
If your temperature is too high, you're taking that wood and just, you're burning the bejesus out of it, right? And so everything is turning into soot and carbon dioxide and water. But if you do it at a low temperature, those big, enormous molecules in trees, right, that hold the trees together, lignin and cellulose, and especially the lignin.
That lignin breaks down slowly, you get chunks like little parts of that molecule fly off.
Sydney Lupkin
And those molecular parts give the meat different flavors.
Matt Hardings
As long as you burn your wood slowly and at a low temperature, again, if you torch it. If you've got huge flames leaping off of it, all those molecules that you're trying to make from your lignin will.
Sydney Lupkin
Break down spice, smoky.
Matt Hardings
And those little parts of those molecules are things like guaiacol, which is spicy and smoky, or vanillin. Right, which tastes like vanilla.
Sydney Lupkin
Different woods impart different flavors, depending on the amount of lignin in the wood and how it's cooked, woods that have.
Matt Hardings
Lots of lignin will have a very hearty smell to it. So something like mesquite. Mesquite has a really strong aroma to it, and that's because of the amount of lignin in it. Has.
Some other woods that aren't as lignin heavy are not going to be quite so bold.
Sydney Lupkin
There's also a thing called a smoke ring, which is the pink coloring that you get on the outside of the meat when it's smoked under the bark. It starts with a protein in muscles known as myoglobin, that carries or stores oxygen until we need to move. Then it burns the oxygen and some sugars.
Matt Hardings
Myoglobin is also what makes our meat, our muscles, red. Right. It's what gives it its red color.
Normally, when you cook myoglobin, what happens is we talked about the unraveling of these proteins.
That myoglobin unravels, changes its shape, and it turns from red to brown.
Sydney Lupkin
We're used to seeing that when we cook meat, whether it's smoked or not. But in the chemical reactions in smoking, the smoker creates nitrous oxide, too.
Matt Hardings
Nitrous oxide binds where the oxygen would normally go. There's an iron atom in the middle of your myoglobin, and so the nitrous oxide goes onto that iron atom, and it doesn't change color.
When the protein unravels, it stays this beautiful pink color.
And so when you smoke your meat and do it right, you get this sort of nitrous oxide infused meat, and that's what gives it that pretty pink color.
Sydney Lupkin
Fun fact, nitrous oxide is also laughing gas, like at the dentist.
Matt Hardings
If we were to huff a bunch of nitrous oxide right now or whatever, right. Our cheeks would flush pink because the nitrous oxide. And the same happens with carbon monoxide, too, right.
Your cheeks flush pink because all of that, the myoglobin, or even the hemoglobin, right, that carries oxygen in our blood, is going to take those gases on instead of oxygen, and it turns a bright pink. That's the one way that people who are asphyxiated with co or something like that. A coroner will say, well, this person has a high, like a really bright pink blood or bright pink muscle.
We can tell that they've been poisoned with carbon monoxide.
Sydney Lupkin
Okay, so I know that took a turn back to barbecue. The pink smoke ring on the meat actually doesn't have anything to do with the flavor, but it's still important.
Matt Hardings
It indicates that we have cooked our meat when we're doing low and slow at an appropriate temperature and an appropriate pace. We haven't heated it up too quick, we haven't gone too slow with our cooking. There's sort of a temperature range at which you're going to make the smoke ring and do it nicely. Right. Make a very nice smoke ring around the outside of your meat.
And so if you've done that right, it's just an indication that you have cooked your meat properly.
Sydney Lupkin
So how do you know when the meat is done?
Matt Hardings
That is an excellent question.
And this is another big difference between cooking food fast and doing the low and slow. When I'm cooking a steak, the best way to know it's done is to use the meat thermometer and see, well, is it the temperature I want it to be, right. So medium rare is 125. Medium is just over 130. Right.
Sydney Lupkin
It's a little bit different with low and slow cooking.
Matt Hardings
I'm always testing texture. What does it feel like?
And that's the best way to do it. It's hard with ribs. It's hard to do because you can't like, sort of jab at the ribs too much. Something like pulled pork. It's super easy. Right? You kind of take your pork and take your fork and will it shred that pork right away? If it starts to shred, you're golden.
Sydney Lupkin
And it falls apart because of all those protein changes that happen in just the right way, thanks to cooking low and slow and picking the right wood. So when you're smoking meat, you're seeing science in action.
Matt Hardings
One of the things that I love about smoking, there's a couple kinds of cooking that just fascinate me from the standpoint of an academic chemist.
People, when they step into a kitchen, whether it's making bread, whether it is cooking pancakes, whether it is brewing beer, whether it's making barbecue, you are doing such incredible chemistry whenever you're doing that, you are a chemist.
Sydney Lupkin
A big thanks to pitmaster George loving and chemist Matt Hardings for their expertise on low and slow cooking. And to short wave's very own meat smoker Giselle Grayson for this reporting this episode was produced by Britt Hansen and Burleigh McCoy and edited by Sadie Babitz. Giselle Grayson and Susie Cummings checked the facts. The audio engineer was Josh Newell. I'm Sydney Lupkin. Thanks for listening to short wave from NPR.
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