2/19/2023 0 Comments Searing a roastIt seems to have satisfied a latent hunger for a new, more rational approach to cookery. By contrast, gradual heating in initially cold water encourages such losses, and is the appropriate method for making a nutritious soup.Īlthough Liebig's monograph does not touch directly on roasting, it would be consistent with his analysis of boiling to sear a roast near the fire at the outset, thereby sealing in the juices, and then continue farther away to cook the interior.Įven though Liebig's theory bucked at least a century of tradition, it caught on very quickly. Then, when the meat is dropped in the pot, Liebig wrote, the protein ''immediately coagulates from the surface inwards, and in this state forms a crust, or shell,''which prevents the muscle juices from escaping or being diluted by the cooking water. In the case of boiling, the water should be brought to the boil before it is used. The loss of muscle fluids could be prevented, Liebig said, by heating the meat surface very quickly. in the 18th and early 19th centuries, the standard practice throughout Europe and North America was to cook the roast slowly, at a moderate distance from the fire, and move it closer to brown it - what the French called giving it ''une belle couleur'' -only at the end. This by continuing turning before the fire, will make a thin crust, which will keep in all the juyce of the meat.'' But Harold McGee wrote ''On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen'' (Scribner's, 1984). The general idea that high heat seals in food moisture can be traced back as far as Aristotle's ''Meteorology.'' In the 16th century, the English courier Kenelm Digby set down a technique for sealing in the juices of a fowl late in the roasting process, when the cook should ''powder it all over very thin with flower. And, despite its having been disproved long ago, it lives on quite vigorously. Its American career was launched by the woman who campaigned tirelessly and successfully for a national holiday of Thanksgiving. It is an early example - perhaps the first - of a scientific theory upending a culinary tradition. WITH fall fading into memory and the winter feasts upon us, cooks face an age-old problem: how to insure that the holiday roast turns out to be the succulent centerpiece of the meal, rather than a mere dry substratum for gravy or sauces.Īpart from the self-evident and unenlightening maxim ''Don't overcook,'' many of us rely on the more positive rule that an initial searing at very high temperatures will ''seal in the juices'' of meat and guarantee a moist tenderness.
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