Mythconceptions
92: BLOODY STEAK
The myth
Necrophages given to macho posturing often like to show how butch they are by ordering their steak lightly cooked, so that when they cut into it, it oozes blood. That’s the red stuff that sloshes about their plates, and drips onto their garish neckties: blood.
The “truth”
Whether you’re buying it raw or eating it rare, your meat does not contain blood – or not much, anyway. Almost all the blood was drained out of the corpse at the slaughterhouse, long before it reached the butcher’s shop, supermarket, or unmarked van in the car park of a disused pub where you bought it. That pink juice is merely water mixed with a red-pigmented protein named myoglobin. Animals from which “red meat” is made naturally contain a lot of both ingredients, whereas “white meat” species don’t. (Some animals, like poultry, have a mixture of both muscle types). The function of myoglobin is to store oxygen in muscle cells. Its colour changes when the meat is cooked, looking “bloodier” when the meat has only reached comparatively low temperatures, and browner after cooking at high temperatures. And, of course, the more you cook the meat, the less water will be left in it to carry the myoglobin onto the plate. Rare meat may be redder, and juicier – but bloody steaks don’t exist.
Sources
https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/meat/INT-what-meat-color.html; http://www.britannica.com/science/myoglobin; http://msue.anr.msu. edu/news/the_color_of_meat_depends_on_myoglobin_part_1
Disclaimer
This column never claims expertise on the matters it covers – and, being vegetarian, it does so even less than usual this time. If we’ve got anything wrong, please get your knife and fork out and tuck in over on FT’s letters page.
Mythchaser
Was there ever a time when it was legally and socially acceptable (and routinely done) to empty your chamber pot out of the window? It’s a defining image of the yucky middle Ages – but in an era which often had stricter hygiene laws than we have today, can it really have been true?