Welcome to Meathead Talks, a series of curated articles from AmazingRibs on everything from kitchen science to myth busting to tips for upping your grill game. All articles are written by the Meathead, a brilliant chef and self-proclaimed Barbecue Whisperer whose culinary word are heeded as gospel in many circles.
For this "Meathead Talks: The Science and Art of Barbecuing and Grilling" review, he invites you to look at the debate about starting temp for cooking meat. Do you allow the meat to come to room temp before you start your cook, or not?
Plenty of meat experts will tell you letting the meat sit at room temp for an hour or so is the "smart" way to avoid overcooking a gorgeous dry aged steak. Many will "hot tub" a steak, wrapped, in lukewarm water for an hour or so to guarantee you have an even temperature edge-to-edge before grilling. But Meathead asks if this it true. Will the cold center of a steak result in overcooking? Is it even safe to rest a dry aged roast on the counter? And with butcher-handled steak that may have been jaccarded, how much greater is the risk of spoilage if you follow the room temp so-called best practice.
Meathead thoroughly investigates this practice. He even recounts how following the expert opinion the venerated Wolfgang Puck yielded a roast that started to smell a bit funky.
By reading Meathead's analysis of the room temp debate you will learn:
1) How and why allowing meat come to room temp can cause surface spoilage.
2) How unlabeled blade tenderized or jaccarded meat increases the risk because any potential surface contamination has been "punched" into the meat while being mechanically tenderized.
3) How different cooking methods (slow cooking, smoking, reverse searing, etc. might not kill pathogens effectively if they have been allowed to proliferate before cooking.
4) How with some thick cuts or some preparations like smoking, you actually get better results if the meat starts out cold.
Trust Meathead to ask hard questions and provide carefully investigated answers--often surprising answers that go against popular meat myths. He will bring in scientific expertise like Greg Blonder to provide you with solid information, not just opinion.
We hope that taking a few moments to digest this article takes your meat smarts another big step forward. After you have spent six weeks carefully and safely dry aging a gorgeous boneless ribeye in UMAi Dry®, the last thing you want to do is ruin that dry aged goodness in that last hour.
