Meat recipes for every occasion include slow-cooked elk, low-sodium pork tenderloin, and perfectly seared filet mignon. Master oven-roasting in bags and electric smoker techniques for the best pulled pork.
A well-prepared rack of ribs is one of the best arguments for long, slow cooking methods. Whether braised in your slow cooker, slow-roasted in your oven or smoke-roasted over low coals in traditional barbecue fashion, ribs cook to a lush, tender richness.
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The brisket is one of the most challenging pieces of beef to cook well. A thick slab of muscle from the steer's chest, it's filled with dense muscle fibers and tough connective tissue. Cooked by most methods, it would be as tough as an old shoe.
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The difference between good beef and great beef is sometimes due to the qualities of the animal itself. More often, however, the difference is because of how that beef is handled after slaughter. Most modern beef is wet-aged, an economical and cost-effective process.
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When they're properly made, meatballs are moist, tender and juicy. Unfortunately, even the best of cooks occasionally produce a batch that fall well short of that ideal. If you're in the unfortunate position of making up a batch of meatballs only to find them hard and dry, take heart.
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Hams include some of the most legendary of all cured meats, from French Bayonne hams to Italian prosciutto, from Chinese Yunnan hams to the Smithfields of the American South. Whether wet-cured or dry, smoked or unsmoked, the rich flavor of a good ham always comes through.
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Steaks and chops are easy to find almost anywhere, but some less-common cuts can be a challenge. Unless you know a farmer or meat-cutter, you'll almost always have to special-order beef cheeks.
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In its natural state, beef brisket is one of the toughest pieces of the steer. It's a flat, leathery cut made of unusually long and stringy muscle fibers. However, when it's cooked long and slow at a low temperature, brisket is utterly transformed.
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When you're grilling meat on your Weber barbecue, you're typically exposing it to intense, direct heat. This cooks the meat very quickly and browns it well, but it doesn't allow a lot of time for heat to penetrate into the interior of the meat. With a steak or a chops, direct heat isn't a problem.
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You can find countless variations on meat pies made around the world. Some are baked, some are fried, some are prepared in deep dishes and others are intended to be eaten by hand. The only thing they have in common, from empanadas to Jamaican "patties"
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Turning out a perfect roast involves a number of tradeoffs for the cook. High-temperature roasting produces lots of browning, which means lots of flavor, but it tends to toughen and dry out your roast. That's especially true of small and lean cuts, such as a pork loin.
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Patience and low temperatures are the keys to making delectable, oven-cooked brisket. In its original condition, it's as tough and chewy as a slab of old leather, yet when properly cooked, it's tender and delicious. Getting your piece of brisket from one stage to the other requires slow, careful cooking.
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Many retail cuts can be found on a beef steer, some tough and some tender. The tough cuts are usually ground or slow-cooked, while the premium cuts of tender beef are grilled or broiled. The top sirloin is the lowest priced of the tender cuts for grilling.
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Like eggs and raw chicken, ground beef -- and ground meat in general -- is a food that knowledgeable cooks treat with extra caution. It can easily become contaminated with bacteria, either at the processing facility or after you bring it home, and has a limited storage life in your refrigerator.
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Pressure cookers are able to produce full meals in a much shorter time than conventional pots and pans. They do this by artificially creating a high atmospheric pressure in the pot, which allows the trapped water and steam to reach temperatures well above the normal boiling point of water.
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Until refrigeration became cheap and widespread in the 20th century, our forebears kept leftovers covered at room temperature in their pantries. Not surprisingly, sudden illnesses were also common in those days.
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Defining the "best" of anything is a tricky proposition. When it comes to roast beef, for example, the most common cuts are very different. The one that's best for you at any given meal is the one that meets your needs.
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A thick slice of center-cut beef shank looks remarkably like a well-marbled steak, and is often labeled as shank steak in retail stores. They're too tough for grilling, but like chuck steaks, they're ideal for braising.
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There are few parts of a hog that don't respond well to curing, from its meaty jowls -- the storied "guanciale" your deli charges so much for -- to crisp bacon and juicy hams.
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Some of the toughest cuts of beef, such as the bony neck neck, are also the most richly flavored. They require long, slow cooking to tenderize the dense muscles and stringy connective tissues, but that's a good thing.
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The chuck, or beef shoulder, contains a large number of mostly small muscles running in several different directions. Appropriately, they're known by a similar variety of names in different parts of the country. For example, two different roasts are sold as inside-blade, depending on your butcher's preferences.
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