The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 227: Red Cutter

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Steven Rinella talks with meat scientist Dr. Chris Calkins, Spencer Neuharth, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor.Topics discussed: debunking meat myths; how stress affects the flavor of meat; myoglobin and hemoglobin; why you shouldn't cut into an animal before rigor mortis is complete; muscle is muscle; Steve's insistence on saying "red cutter," when it's actually dark cutter; the benefits of electrocuting meat; to bleed or not to bleed; muscle is 75% water; why you should keep the bones attached; does hanging help?; a certain antiquated way of slaughtering turkeys; why you should wait before freezing; the seven distinct meats in a snapping turtle and PhD. dissertation ideas; what marbling is; the time when Steve ate a sliver of 18-month-aged aoudad that tasted like blue cheese; black fuzzy mold is bad; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. All right, everyone. We're joined today by our first ever, should have done this a long time ago, our first ever genuine meat scientist, Chris Calkins. Do you go by, is that right? Meat scientist? Is that cool that cool to say absolutely that's the right way to do it let me test your knowledge to find out if you're legit do you know what a warner i think it's called a warner bruntler sheer force test is well it's a warner bratzler. Ken Warner and Lyman Bratzler decades ago created an objective tenderness machine, and it was that sheer force machine you're referring to. Did I pass?

So you passed, but let me ask you this question. How many holes does that thing punch into the steak? That's, it's up to the operator, but typically we would expect to get six cores from a regular beef steak, for example. In smaller animals, you have to get by with fewer cores and more steaks. Okay, good. We'll proceed now. Now I have faith that Corinne found us the right meat scientist. First off, tell us what is meat science and how does one get there? It's been an interesting journey to become a meat scientist. I was involved in agriculture as a high school student in the state of Washington. Had a really cool high school ag teacher who was a lifetime mentor for me.

And I was lucky enough as a senior in high school, I served as state future Farmers of America president, state FFA president. And that same time he went to Texas A&M to work on a master of science in meat science. And I always thought I was going to be a veterinarian, but I packed everything in the car, drove to Texas. And the day I got there, I got a job in the meat lab and I liked it well enough. Apparently I've never left since then. So. And you eventually went on and got a, like, what is your, you have a PhD, like what is it, what is it, what was your dissertation? Like what sort of, like, how do you narrow in on this super broad meat science category and find your personal expertise? Well, that's a great point because the field of meat science is really quite broad. That is everything from the live animal all the way through to the products that we eat.

And my dissertation had to do with the enzymes in meat that break up proteins. In other words, the tenderization process. And I have built my career looking at quality, particularly eating quality characteristics of meat. How familiar are you with kind of like layman perspectives about meat right like you have to in conversations with people or in restaurants or backyard barbecues you have to hear a lot of like theories about why this is that way that that are way off off. And I don't know if you hang out with hunters or not, but you'd probably get inundated with screwball theories about what is the way it is or why certain things are this way and why they're that way. Yeah, it becomes a compulsion really to try and set the record straight,

make sure everybody understands what we're talking about. So I'm, in addition to having a 70% of my time is spent on research, but the other 30% is spent on teaching. So I teach both undergraduate students as well as master and doctoral students as well. Yeah. Let me hit you with a okay spencer's gonna hit spencer new hearth our very own special spencer new hearth is now gonna hit you with um this is probably the question we get the most and this is a wild game question but i'm sure it has so many parallels to domestic production that you'll know exactly what we're talking about but this is sort of the leading hunter based wild game problem question how would you put it spencer do stressed out animals taste worse and can that stress be a factor of something like the rut

for a white-tailed deer an elk, or from a bad shot where a deer is hit and then it runs a mile and it lays there for four hours and slowly dies? Can a stress like that or the adrenaline make them taste worse? That initial burst of adrenaline does not have a real big impact. But if it's around for very long, in other words, if we have longer term stress, like the rut, for example, then absolutely, there are metabolic changes that take place in the meat that will impact the eating quality of that product. I'd be happy to explain that further, but I don't know how deep you want to go. No, dig in, man. We want to go way deep. Awesome. So think about what we know is the

way the body stores energy is through glycogen initially, and then that turns, we also store energy as fat. But that glycogen is used to provide the short term burst of energy we need when an animal, for example, is running. Now, it turns out that once that animal's been harvested, that glycogen gets converted to acid in the muscle, it becomes more acidic, we would say it has a lower pH. That's normal. That's good. That's what we're all used to with all of the muscle foods that we eat, is that normal pH decline that occurs when an animal is harvested. The problem is when you get that burst of adrenaline, or you spend five days at the rut running around, acting like a teenager and not eating and all the rest of that. We exhaust

the glycogen stores in the animal. And when that happens, that pH does not drop. It does not become acidic. And we get all kinds of weird, strange flavors. And the texture is different. It's dark. It's sticky. Most people find that kind of product not very desirable. And the time course of that really depends on how much stress the animal has and how long it takes place. So Spencer, your question about four hours and a long, slow death, that's probably long enough to have an impact on that animal. If that animal is injured in the wild say it breaks a leg or something then all of those kinds of things will give long enough stress glycogen is exhausted pH stays high meat doesn't taste very good you know a good extreme of this that I think about is

one time my brother a rancher that my brother and his friends know, told them about a bull that he had that had broken its leg down in the bottom of some coulee. And it had been down there a while, and he couldn't find it, and eventually found it. And he told those guys, if you want to go get it, you can have it. This thing is huge, you know. And they went down and got it, and my brother comes home and makes a steak out of it. And I mean, it was probably already a bull. It was already a bull.

So that's probably a couple of strikes against it. But I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I say that it was unchewable. Yeah. It's most of the stress related response has to do with taste, has to do with flavor. The fact that it was a bull and an older animal, that's what makes it tough. But we have people who contact us regularly with a very similar situation. An animal is injured, has been hanging around for quite a while, and they wonder, can they turn it into steak or ground beef?

And it's just a different taste. And so that's a pretty common complaint that people have. Home, so the toughness isn't related to stress? Not so much. The stress has a far bigger impact on flavor than it does on toughness all right so what are the things that make certain things like what makes certain animals inexplicably tough like you know i mean you could sometimes you'll have guys get a whatever like you get you know a buck or someone will get you know 10 bull elk and they're all great and the 11th one is just chewier in hell um right we'll often say like oh he must have been stressed would be our that'd be like a thing that we would

say when you encounter that super tough animal there's there's really three things broadly that impact toughness one has to do with how contracted that muscle cell is, how much integrity there is in the muscle cell. The second thing has to do with something called connective tissue. That's that white silvery tissue on the outside of the meat. And then the third part is fat. And so anything we do to impact any of those three things can impact tenderness. Let me ask you one more, and Spencer's got to ask you a good question. Have you ever had occasion to eat like soup, like to eat deer meat right away or any kind of meat? Okay. So whatever, like if you get an animal and then cook it within a couple hours it's like it's kind of like a divisive taste like some people like it some people don't like it it definitely has a

different texture there's something in it that seems almost like a metallic taste that then that's gone in a day or two right so. So we know that once you shoot an animal and enough time passes, it gets rigid. It gets stiff. We call that rigor mortis, right? And that process is the process of all of the energy in the muscle dissipating once the heart stops beating and you've stopped blood flow. And that is actually a toughening process. In fact, once you get to that point, that's about as tough as that meat's going to be. We can then hang it longer in a cooler or

outside in cold air, and that allows the meat to become more tender. But if you get a hold of that meat before it's into rigor mortis and you cut it, that cutting stimulates contraction. You put it on a hot pan or a hot grill, that stimulates that contraction, and you can get meat that's literally too tough to chew. I, you know, every now and then somebody says, I love to shoot an animal, then immediately go cut a steak and go eat it. To me, that's disrespectful of the animal. Because you are eating that meat in the worst possible conditions to have a good eating experience.

If you'll at least let that animal go through rigor mortis to get stiff, then you're going to have a far better eating experience. Okay, Spencer, hold tight. All right. I don't understand what you're saying because I, like, explain the rigor mortis timeline. I would think that when it's in rigor, it's all stiffened up. Right. But before rigor, it has the potential to contract. And if you stimulate the animal by

cutting the meat or more importantly, by putting it on a hot skillet, it will stiffen up. It will shorten more than usual. And if you wait until the animals, okay, so let's say there's an animal, whatever, you're in a slaughterhouse or whatever, you kill an animal. There's an animal that just dies, okay? Struck by, I don't want to say struck by lightning. It just dies. At first, you can wiggle it all around.

You can grab its arm and shake it. Yes. Then a while later, you can't. Then a while later, you can wiggle it all around. You can grab its arm and shake it. Yes. Then a while later, you can't. Then a while later, you can. So during the period when it's stiffened up, that is more tender than before it stiffens up? If you could cook it without allowing it to contract, it would be tender, but you cannot do that. When we cut the steak, we remove all the muscle bone connections, and so that muscle is free to contract. And so before rigor mortis is complete, that is a very dynamic muscle that can shorten and toughen as you handle the product. Once it goes into rigor, then you're at a certain level of tenderness.

And from that time on, beyond where rigor happens, it will just get more and more tender the longer you keep it in the cooler. Okay. I'm mostly good on that one. Like a lot of the studies that have been done in the literature that you're referencing has been on like domestic game cattle that was, you know, been domesticated over the last 10,000 years versus something like a white tail deer or an elk, a wild animal. They're just wired differently. And so my question is like when they're talking about stress, how is how do we know that stress is the same to a deer versus cattle? And then all the rest of your answers, if they lack any confidence, knowing that we're talking about beef versus wild game. Muscle is muscle. I do not lack confidence on the science.

And Spencer, we could get in an argument but i will win no you got them all wrong he's not trying to be pugnacious he's just trying to he's he's trying to people at home are so there's people at home in the future listen to this they're at home thinking yeah what does he know we're talking about deer so he's just trying to clear that up yes no i'm just giving you a hard time i totally understand your the point that you're saying uh i have i have studied a variety of different species i have studied product from around the world and muscle responds the same way that some of the timelines are different. And so, for example, poultry, for example, a chicken, it will go into rigor mortis in an hour and a half.

A beef animal might take eight or 10 hours before it's fully into rigor mortis. If you take a goat or sheep, they're in there in four to six hours. That's about what I'd anticipate for deer as well. So the biology of muscle contraction and rigor mortis and all of that, that's fixed. It's going to happen in all of the different species that we're talking about. Now, we have to think about most of the time when you think about that beef steer, for example, that animal's been neutered. And so it doesn't have the access to all of those hormones that an intact male would have. And so the sensitivity to hormone fluctuations might vary a little bit from species to species and depending on what sex or gender you're dealing with.

But at the end of the day, the biology says all muscles go through the same sequence, the same kind of process as what I've tried to describe. Can you tell us, explain a term I hear now and then? I thought it was a red cutter, but Spencer convinced me otherwise, that that's not actually a thing. And he was saying, do you mean a dark cutter? Like what is a dark cutter? So when we talked about the drop in pH that happens normally when rigor occurs, that gives us the normal color that we're used to seeing inside the muscle. If the pH stays high, then the meat is very dark in color. And so in beef cattle, they call it a dark cutter. Have you ever heard red cutter?

I've never heard red cutter until about two minutes. I'm giving up on that one. But it's the same way you can get that same condition in pork. If pork are stressed for too long, you can get, in that case, we call it dfd dark firm and dry and so they're all just descriptions that's how you're talking that you just described wild you just described wild pig a lot of wild pig pretty well yeah so that when you have a dark cutter in this in the slaughter world or commercial slaughter world, is it attributable to a specific thing that happened to that animal or is it just some percentage will come out that way? No, it is a response to sustained stress. But just like people, some animals are pretty chill and some animals are

really tightly wired. The ones that are high strung, high stress, those are the ones that are going to be more likely to have the problem. So the same set of conditions, whether it's duration or shipping or hauling or whatever the same set of conditions will have a different impact on every animal depending on how that animal responds to the situation yeah i got you there's a product these guys were selling maybe maybe spencer maybe remember the name of it it was um it was a contraption where you could shoot a deer and then run over real quick and hook this thing up to your car battery and zap it like how you zap them in a in a slaughterhouse can you explain uh why they do that in a in a plant why they zap them with electricity.

And then is it realistic that you could replicate that in the wild? Whatever the hell you're trying to get when you do it. Yeah. So let's first talk about what happens. When you apply electricity, you cause the muscle to contract. And by the way, a car battery doesn't work very well because that's a constant continuous electrical field. What you really want is alternating current. So the muscle contracts, relaxes, contracts, relaxes. As you do that, you're using up glycogen, you're producing acid, you are hastening the rate at which rigor mortis

occurs. That makes meat more tender. And so from the mechanism standpoint, it works. Can we create something like that that could be used in the field? Again, as long as you have pulses of electricity rather than a continuous contraction, then you're going to have some improvement as possible under that scenario. The other thing I would point out is when we shoot a deer, the heart stops, right? And that's how blood is pumped through the body. So when the heart is no longer beating, we can't pump blood out. So some electrical impulse will help get a little bit of that blood out of the system. And so that's the other side benefit so what is the ideal shot placement for a hunter in the head in the neck in the heart in the lungs in the spine like what would be your

top choice yeah so just in terms of me just we'll limit this to like in terms of meat quality and get out of the and not bog it down with room for error right margin for error and all that exactly i appreciate that because that is a bit of the question at the end of the day you you want the animal to go from being alive to no longer being alive and a heart heart shot, a head shot, any of those will affect that same consequence. And so from a meat quality standpoint, other than damage to tissue and those kind of things, there's probably not a real big difference among those locations. Have you ever seen, I can't really, it's hard to even explain this. Sometimes when you're, when you're skinning a deer, you'll find that there's like a,

you know, that foam, there's like a foam between the, like a, like a bubbly foam that forms between the hide and the meat. Right. What is that stuff? Well, that's part of that connective tissue that I talked about again. That is a protein-based structure that goes between the muscles and also between the muscle and the hide. No damage, no risk, no concern on that standpoint. I might mention, though, that we think about, well, if you've got that silver tissue on the outside of the muscle, you can always trim that off. But if you get a

microscope and look at that muscle, that tissue actually goes throughout the muscle. And that's why a muscle from the leg, for example, is inherently less tender than a muscle that's from the loin or the back strap. Because those are muscles of support versus the legs being muscles of locomotion. They need more of that connective tissue. So by and large, if you've got a piece of meat with a lot of connective tissue in it, you know, slow roasting, putting in a pot and stew it. That kind of a thing is how we tend to cook that. Whereas you get the muscles that don't have very much connective tissue, the tenderloins, the backstraps, all of that. We can make steaks out of those, throw them in a skillet, throw them on the grill and have a very nice eating experience what uh what happens when well first let me ask you this have you have you had exposure to to your

um your passivorous uh counterparts like fish fish meat is that a thing i'm not much on fish meat i can't tell you too much about that. Are there people in the meat science world that specialize in fish? Yes. There are people who specialize in fish, people who specialize in pork or beef or poultry. Yeah, we can be a pretty specialized group. So this question about bleeding, if you know about the process of bleeding fish you can speak to that but what are you trying to achieve when what are you trying to achieve when you bleed something when people talk about like needing to bleed it out like what what are you really getting that's that's a that's a awesome question because a lot of people run around saying there's all this blood in the meat

muscle which is true muscle is 75 percent water right okay so is that right really you have to think about what's the function of blood and one of the main things is we carry oxygen through blood right on hemoglobin molecules. Inside the meat is a molecule that also binds oxygen, binds it better than hemoglobin, actually. So it draws the oxygen out of the blood into the meat, and it binds to myoglobin. And so when you look at meat, and that meat is red in color, that's myoglobin and so when you look at meat and that meat is red in color that's myoglobin there's very very little hemoglobin very little blood in the meat itself but because meat's 75 percent water everybody goes oh my gosh look at all the blood that's in that meat but most of that is

myoglobin and water that's inside the muscle so So when you bleed, you're just trying to get rid of the bloods that's there. And probably the biggest real reason for that is it's a great nutrient for bacterial growth and spoilage. And so we try and remove that so that we don't have to deal with it. Hold on. You're saying that blood in the meat lends itself to quicker spoilage? Not necessarily. Meat's a pretty good bacterial medium for growth anyway. But typically in commercial animals, we remove the blood just so that we don't have to deal with that as we go down the line. Otherwise, it tends to drip and get all over everything. Oh, I got you. So once it's out, it becomes problematic. Yeah. You don't want it around. Yeah. Yes. I want to back up to

dark cutters real quick. Red cutters. Yeah, yeah. Steve's red cutters. Like the obvious stressors are like taking a long time to die and like not eating. But what are some of the not so obvious stressors that hunters wouldn't think of? Like is weather something that would stress out an animal and make their meat worse or like interacting with foreign animals, things like that? Yes. It's a really good question, Spencer, and you're absolutely right. Just think about you or I, right? Anything that causes us stress causes that animal stress as well. And so part of that has to do with physical stress.

If it's cold and you're trying to stay warm, for example. We also have social stress, right? You mix people up in an elevator and everybody gets kind of quiet and awkward. And that kind of stress also creates circumstances or situations that can impact the animal. In the case of females, if they're cycling, then that hormonal cycle can create stress as well that draws glycogen out of the muscle. Why is that stressful for them? That's a really tough question to answer. It just creates enough different physiological responses to those hormones that that animal is going to need more energy and it's going to draw against that glycogen stores to be able to supply that. Sort of like nervous energy, if you think of it that way. Yeah, yeah.

So you never hear like hunters and fishermen complain about a spawning fish tasting bad, though, or a strutting turkey or anything like that? Is it just because like we're really ignorant or is it less likely to happen in poultry and fish? Don't know about fish. In poultry, it can still happen in poultry, but chances are that we're, that's kind of what we expect. It's what we're used to seeing. And the best example I can give you is in poultry, commercial poultry, once they're harvested and you've removed all the viscera, then you want to chill that carcass down quickly. And the way that happens in the industry is you take the poultry carcass and put it in an ice water bath. Now, that cold shock before the muscle is in rigor causes immediate contraction. In comparison, you could also chill that carcass by putting it in a refrigerated cooler. And so you can go to the grocery store now and there is air chilled poultry and there's regular commercial poultry. And I'll tell you, there's a

profound difference in tenderness between those two. Which is better. The air chilled is not as contracted and is far more tender than what we traditionally do with poultry. Are these labeled like things that we can identify in the grocery store? Typically, the air chilled poultry is labeled that way. The others are not. They're traditional, normal commodity product. If you had to look at what you know is done with, I'm going to ask you an equivalent question to this around red meat, but knowing what's done in a poultry slaughter facility, okay? What would be the closest approximation that a person could achieve if they're hunting pheasants or hunting turkeys and they have a pickup truck with them, like what would, what would you do upon what, like, what would you do in terms of a timeline and tools in order to replicate best practices? Yeah.

So, uh, there's, there's two big things. I think one is you, you want to get rid of the guts as soon as possible. That's a food safety issue. If we have feces or fecal material spreading around the inside of that body cavity, the sooner you get all that out, the better off you are. That's number one. Number two is, and we've kind of touched on this earlier, but you just give it time to go into rigor mortis before you do much more with it. And so you don't have to plunge it in ice water. You can allow it to go to rigor for an hour or so once you've removed the viscera, and you'll have a fine eating experience. It's when we go, I think, too fast. It's when we try and, you know, get the animal and stuff it with snow, or we get the animal and throw it in the skillet too quickly. That's where we get quality problems being created.

Hold on, you're saying it's bad to stuff them with snow? Most of the time, you don't need to do that. Oh. And if you got, say, a deer, for example, and let's assume it's a heart shot as opposed to a head shot, so you've disrupted the internal organs, right? And so the best thing you can do from a food safety standpoint is to remove all those organs from the inside of the animal. Now, once you've done that, there's a chance there's some fecal material in there. And so what happens when you stuff it with snow? You've just smeared all that around. And as the snow melts, you've smeared that bacteria around on the inside.

The fact is the animal is going to chill out at a reasonable rate anyhow. Now, if you're dealing with a very large animal and it's warm outside, you know, it'd be nicer if you could cool that off a little quicker, but you're not going to have snow around to do that under that circumstance anyway. So I don't think it's necessary to try and accelerate the chilling rate of animals as long as you deal with the meat in a timely manner after it's in rigor mortis. So are you saying there's such thing is freezing something too soon like if you shot a duck at 9 a.m. and you had it breast and gutted by 10 a.m. and go in a freezer is that too quick ah completely and in fact we actually had a had a former student in our department who went to work in Alaska and they're harvesting reindeer when it was 20 below outside. And the problem they had

is they'd harvest the deer, lay it on the ground, and in 20 minutes it'd be frozen. Now what happens is when the meat thaws, then you get massive muscle contraction, way more than normal. So absolutely too fast to the freezer is not a good thing. The other dimension of that, Spencer, that you ask about, which is interesting, I think, is that it's better if you can go into rigor with the muscles attached to the bones. Because that, to some extent, that limits contraction. If you remove all those connections of the muscle to the bone that muscle is free to shorten up as much as it wants to

that's really interesting because there's a uh there's a real debate in the hunting world around um things like things like called the, you know, the, the, the gutless method or, you know, various ideas around deboning things right away in order to reduce weight when you have to carry it a long way. And a lot of people will, and I've certainly done it myself, shoot an animal and then immediately debone it all and put it into bags. And I always view the con of it, the con to doing this would be that it just seems to create a harder time to sort it out when you get home. It makes more surface area for there to be hair and for it to get dirty. But I never

heard anybody talk about that it could even have a negative impact on the end quality in terms of toughness, tenderness. Well, and that is, in fact, the case. That if you bone it out while it's hot, you can compromise the contraction and therefore the tenderness. But, you know, you got to be practical. You can quarter the animal for example and most of the muscle bone attachments are still retained under that scenario but if you're going to take your knife and separate every muscle and and open it up so there are no connections at all then I would say the longer you can wait to do that, the better off you're going to be

because you'll be closer to rigor mortis when you get to that point. Spencer, was that you talking all about, uh, how everybody hangs their deer up wrong? Yes. Yeah. Tell them about that. So I've, I've heard that like a good steakhouse or a good butcher will do the tender stretch method where they hang a car like a typical deer hunter go kill a deer they skin it out and then they hang it by the achilles so it's like as long as it possibly can be but i've heard that the tender stretch method is preferred by the beef industry where you basically put these hooks in their pelvis and then you allow their back hams to relax and hang at more of a 90 degree angle. Is that something that you hear or that you promote? It will definitely give a measurable improvement in tenderness if you use that method.

It is not used in the U.S. meat industry at all. Why? But there are other countries that do. Is it an efficiency thing? No. Well, it's what we're used to, right? We know what the cuts look like. We know what to expect, all the rest of that.

And so if you're going to go to a tender stretch strategy, it's a whole different way of separating that carcass into pieces. And it's just not something the US industry has shown any interest in doing. By and large, certainly on the beef side, the beef in the United States is pretty tender compared to around the world. But I have been to places around the world where the entire cooler is hung through tender stretch. Interesting. Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry.

I've always heard that it's an issue of being efficient. When you hang something by the Achilles, you can fit a lot more of these things in a cooler than if you hang them by the pelvis and then they're taking up a lot more room. Side by side, it'd be about the same. But as that hind leg falls forward, then the distance between the animals would have to be a little bit greater in order to have room for that. It might be interesting. Part of that whole tender stretch method was devised because in New Zealand, they were shipped, this is years ago, they would freeze lambs,

they would slaughter lambs, freeze the carcasses and ship them overseas. And they discovered that that freezing before rigor mortis made really, really tough meat. And so one way to counteract that was to use that tennis stretch method or a similar kind of hanging where the legs fall forward. That, if you think about that, that causes the muscles of the leg on the backside to stretch more. And so because they're stretched more, they're less contracted. But on the inside of the leg those muscles are actually more contracted right and so it's beneficial for some muscles and not so beneficial for other muscles

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I want to tell you a story a guy told me, and I want you to tell me. He's dead, so I want you to tell me if I'm getting his story right. I used to live next door to a guy in Miles City, Montana, who he was in his 90s when I knew him. And he was telling me that his family in Montana, they used to raise turkeys. And they would raise turkeys around, they would time it out in order to be selling Thanksgiving turkeys. They were shipping these turkeys by rail from Montana to Minneapolis. And he told me that they would raise the turkey up and then cut off its food supply

so that its digestive tract emptied completely and they would only give it water. Then they would kill the turkeys, pluck them, and not gut them because that led to spoilage quicker and that they would pack these turkeys into barrels, guts in them, but no food in their system and ship them by rail to Minneapolis for people to eat on Thanksgiving. This is in the 1930s. I was going to say, this was a while ago. Does that make any sense? Well, part of it does. Actually, if you think about ruminants, right, they have a lot of gut

fill. And so it takes a long time for that to get gone. So you could cut off feed source to an animal for a while, you know, 12, 24 hours or whatever. And biologically, that animal doesn't know it. It maybe starts to get a little hungry, but biologically, it's got all the energy and everything else it needs. Water, access to water is huge. If you do not have access to water, that whole dark cutting condition becomes evident more quickly. Oh, really? Access to water is pretty important. And so I could fathom a place where you don't feed the turkeys and you have less gut fill, that probably minimizes a little bit the risk. But to be honest with you, I would highly recommend that they be, they have the guts removed as opposed to just icing them down and leaving the guts in there. After the animal dies, there is migration of gut bacteria that comes through the walls of the intestines into the rest of the body cavity.

Oh, really? And of course, icing that would slow it down and all the rest of that. But why run the risk, right? Just remove it and let that natural process of cooling and aging take place after that. That's one other thing I want to mention, Steve, is that we've talked a lot about what happens up until rigor mortis. But I would sure want your listeners to understand that after rigor mortis, then as we store that meat in a refrigerator, that meat's going to gradually get more and more tender because of those enzymes that are naturally in the meat. So I'm thinking back on your turkey question about the guy with the pickup

who shoots a turkey is what should he do? Waiting to freeze that meat even if it's a day or two is going to make that meat more tender and beef we see that that muscle improves in tenderness for about seven to ten days after that it still improves but at a much lower rate. And so it would be, you would get far better product if you age that beef two weeks before you cut it into steaks. In the case of deer or whatever, even if it's three or four days, that's going to be better than cutting it and putting it in the freezer immediately. Similar to Steve's turkey question, talking about how those turkeys were cut off from food. The guys in my hometown of South Dakota that teach me how to clean snapping turtle,

they all did the same thing where they catch a snapping turtle and then they put it in a tank with water and they leave it in there for a week. And they say that it's cleansing its system. You don't want to eat them right away. The meat won't be any good. And so all they have for that week is this few inches of water that they're in. Is that a really bad practice? I got to tell you, I don't know anything about you know, what it would do is it would, it would, it would remove food from the GI tract, of course. Is that good or bad?

I don't know. My instinct is it seems a little excessive, but possibly. Corinne, I want you to find us a snapping turtle meat. I know that's a nice one. A snapping turtle meat expert. Chris, do you have any colleagues of yours who've written a dissertation? No one did a dissertation on snappers? Not that I'm aware of. But that's not a practice you would ever do with a cow or a turkey.

That's correct. I would not do that for any of those other animals. But again, it raises another point. You got to understand a little bit about the digestion system of these animals, right? And so a ruminant has bacteria in that large stomach that breaks down the food into very small components that are then absorbed in the bloodstream and converted to proteins and fats and carbohydrates. In the case of a pig or us humans, we don't have a big rumen. And so that food gets absorbed through the small intestine. As a result, it doesn't have to be broken down into quite such small components. So if we feed, for example, if we have a pig that's eating acorns or peanuts, then the fats will be quite oily, the meat will be food parts get broken down so small, the type of diet is not so critical.

Now, the energy in the diet is because remember when we talked about three things that influence tenderness, one of those was fat. So if you get a deer that's grazing on cornfields, for example, that's high energy. They're storing that extra energy in their body in a form of fat. And that will, we, particularly in America, we love the taste of fat in our meat products. And so a high energy diet helps. But whether that high energy comes from corn or wheat is probably not as critical, particularly in wild game. How quickly does that diet need to change for you to notice a change in the meat quality? I always hear people refer to wood ducks as the best tasting ducks because they eat a lot of acorns. But it's hard for me to fathom that throughout their entire migration, they're finding acorns. So how, how quickly would something need to start eating acorns or corn or something like that for you to notice the improved meat? Yeah. So the way to think about that is you, you, first of all, you got to deposit fat from the diet, but you also got to replace fat that's already there.

Right. And so, uh, it, you have to think about how quickly do you get rid of the old fats that are there and how quickly do you add new fats that are there? I don't know specifically for for ducks, for example, but in the case of cattle, they'll be in a feedlot 100, 150 days in order to get the high marbling, the high fat inside the muscle that really gives us. Now, is 50 days enough? Well, it's certainly better than zero, right? So it's a continuum. The longer you do it, the better you're going to be. Can you explain marbling and then like what factors lead an animal to have marbling? Because you'll often hear, I don't know if you know about this or not, but you'll hear people say that, for instance, like that venison isn't marbled.

But this is probably way outside of your expertise, but mountain goat has some marbling. What is it? And is it really not universal? Yeah, well, again, think how that body stores energy. When we get excess energy, our nature is to store it as fat, right? Our glycogen supplies are good, so we start storing energy as fat. Now, that fat can be inside the muscle, that's marbling, or it can be outside the muscle, either under the skin, we call that subcutaneous fat, or between the muscles, which would be intermuscular fat instead of intramuscular fat. And so depending on genetics and the type of animal, they will store energy either inside the muscle

or outside the muscle. And that's probably species specific. Within a species, there are genetic differences. For example, Wagyu beef, for example, has a lot more marbling than does Angus or Hereford or another US breed of cattle. So there are some genetic differences within a species that also regulate how much marbling is deposited. We know this for sure, that you only get marbling when you have a high energy diet. And if you don't, then marbling is least likely to be deposited. So a lot of wild game, you know, they're foraging, but they're not on, they're not in the cornfield, they're not getting a high energy diet. So they're probably not going to have as much marbling, even if they have the genetic potential to deposit it in the first place.

You know, I want to back up a little bit and this kind of goes back to gutting things and and the sort of timeline around rigor but you hear people describe aging which we want to get into later but you'll hear people describe aging as like a controlled decomposition right i don't know i don't know if that's a fair statement or not. But what happens when well, I'll put it another way. Sometimes someone will complain about oh, I got a deer, an antelope, whatever, and it didn't taste,

you know, it was no good. It was too gamey, whatever. And people will say, oh, yeah, but he shot the deer and then rode around with it in the back of his truck for three days okay um where if if aging is like is decomposition where does rotting like where does aging end and rotting begin like what is the difference there? That's an awesome question. Think about dry aged beef for a moment, right?

It could be aged 40, 50, 60, 70 days. And yet normally we would think if you had a steak in your refrigerator for that long, it's long gone, right? You're going to throw it away. And so you have to differentiate between when we talk about aging, we're talking about the breakdown of the tissues, mostly the protein inside the meat. Whereas when I think about spoilage or rotting, I'm really thinking about bacterial growth on the outside of that tissue. So if you have a way to age, but to reduce bacterial growth, you can still get improvement

in tenderness. Certainly you'll get changes in flavor from oxidation that normally occurs, but you could age for longer if you could get rid of bacterial growth, right? And so that's why you got to be real sanitary when you're out there working. Like you say, avoid the grass and the extra blood and everything else getting all over the meat, because all that does is help inoculate the outside surface of that meat with bacteria. And that's not a good thing when it comes to eating quality. So if you could have a hypothetical situation where you could eliminate all life inside of a walk-in cooler, meaning there is no bacteria. There's no fungus.

Like all life is gone inside some space. You would put a deer in there and that deer would still age, but it wouldn't rot. Right. Now, it would dehydrate, right? It would dry out. Remember, meat's 75% water. Yeah. dehydrate, right? It would dry out. Remember meat, 75% water. And so the typical dry aging over that 40, 50 day period might lose 10 or 15% of the weight, right? So there's still a lot more

water that can come out. But at some point, you're practically making jerky. It's just so dry that there's nothing else to do. So you couldn't do it indefinitely. The idea would be that you could safely age longer if you could get rid of the bacteria. And by the way, the bacteria wouldn't necessarily already be in the cooler. We bring it in when we bring in the carcass of the animal. So that guy who's driving around with a antelope on the back of his truck for a couple of days, he's inoculating that product is what he's doing by the time you get done with it. I recently read a book called Extra Virginity and it was about the scandalous world of olive oil and how it's

like rampant to take a $10 bottle of olive oil and put a $500 price tag on it, a $500 label. Is the world of meat exempt from that, or does it happen cutting is overseen by employees of the federal government. And so meat fraud is very, very, very low. There are inspectors there to ensure safety and wholesomeness. There are agents that deal with accuracy and labeling and the rest of that kind of thing. And so there's a lot of reasons why meat fraud would be at a minimum. Now, if I were going to cheat, I might cut one part of a carcass and tell you it's a different part, right? And so I might try and take something out of the shoulder and make you think it's part of the rib, for example, because there's a dollar value there. It doesn't happen very often, but

that would be one place. The other place where you simply need to be careful is some of the claims that are made about how the animal is raised and handled and so forth. And again, most of the time there are systems in place, there are audits in place, there are government employees in place to ensure that that's accurate. And if there is deception in labeling, the consequences of that are pretty serious. So I don't think there's a lot of fraud in meat, quite honestly. It's funny that Spencer brings up the olive oil thing because I know that there's a ton of fraud in the fish world and i remember reading about this thing where you know there's many varieties of snapper but they don't have name brand recognition i remember reading that

these guys did this thing where 70 some percent of the fish being sold as red snapper is not red snapper but when people look at a menu or going to a fish market they don't want to see mangrove snapper red line or blue line or whatever all these different kinds of snappers so they just throw up like red snapper because people will think like oh but the difference there is it's uh it's not nearly as a controlled system from a supply standpoint that's correct you know some of the guys buying fillets, it's already out of the question, but it's probably hard to pass off

one kind of carcass as another kind of carcass. Though I imagine the grading system could be screwed up. Oh, no. That too is done by federal employees. Oh, is that right? So you don't make your own call on grading? No. You can self-grade and establish your own grading requirements. But if you're going to call

it prime, choice, select, then those grades are through federal employees, federal graders. And that's been a tightly controlled system for a long time. I was in a meat plant this week, actually, where I watched graders work. So it's still happening. Were you second-guessing them? No, no. You agreed with the calls they were making? Yes.

I was actually in there buying meat for a research project, actually. What goes into the different grades? What makes a prime a prime or a choice a choice or a select a select? There's two primary elements used for grade. One is how old the animal is, and the other. And so mostly age is not a question, and it's just how much marbling is present to get prime or choice or select. One time I was working on a magazine story years ago about livestock theft, like contemporary cattle rustling. And I was at a sale yard in Twin Falls, Idaho,

and I was with some guys that run a cow-calf operation. And they were watching what they called milked-out dairy cows climbing off a truck. And they expressed like a high level of disapproval about the condition of the animals. And made a comment about what the beef would be like off those. What were they getting at? Well, it's that it's nutrition again, right? So if you have enough energy, then you can support yourself. You have enough muscle and you have enough fat

to sustain body condition. In the case of dairy cows in particular, they're being milked every day. They're putting a lot of their energy into providing that milk. So you have to provide a really high plane of nutrition. If you're milking and the plane of nutrition lowers, then that animal is going to get a lot leaner and it might even lose a little bit of muscle mass. And so that's that body condition that they're looking at. So not, so it won't be like potentially won't be as good and could be tougher. Well, yeah. So the other issue there is those dairy cows are much older. They could be three,

four or five years old. Whereas young cattle to the marketplace are typically two years or less. And the older an animal, sort of like us, right, the older we get, the tougher we get, right? And that's what happens for muscle as well. Mature animals, more connective tissue, less tender than younger animals. So that, when you're out hunting, you see that three, four year old stag, right? It's, it's not going to be as tender as an animal that's much younger. Are there any exceptions to the rule? Like, does it go as far as that a fawn deer would be way more tender than an old buck?

Yes. What you just said is correct. A fawn would be more tender than a buck with one caveat. That fawn is so small that it would be very easy for that muscle to get cold and contract before it goes into rigor mortis. So if you could control temperature correctly, then that fawn would be way more tender than the older animal. It's the same thing with veal, right? Veal is much younger than the 24-month-old steers and heifers that we buy in the grocery store every day. And veal is much more tender as well. Is veal synonymous with crate-raised veal?

Do you remember all the blow-up years ago about crate-raised veal? Is there a difference? Or is crate-raised veal a qualifier of veal? No. Veal is based on animal age. So most of the veal these days is raised in pens, in group pens, where there are a number of them together. So there is a welfare question that was raised, and I think the industry's responded well to it in that regard. So that is a classification or was a classification of veal rather than just meaning that veal is crate raised? Because I think people thought it was synonymous. Like if it's veal, you know, it was raised in a specific way, but it could skydive and still be veal. Yeah.

The government would say that veal is based on animal age, period. That's it. And so if someone says free-range veal or pin-raised veal or group-raised veal, those descriptors are being used by the people who are marketing the product. Federal government focuses on the fact that it in fact is veal. Why is it bad to eat raw red meat? And are there less threats with something like deer meat versus cow meat? The risk of eating raw meat is primarily one of microbial issues, spoilage, and pathogens that could make you sick. In addition, if there are parasites in the meat, then if you haven't cooked it, then that's a risk as well. And so I would think game meat would be perhaps more likely to have parasites in commercial production of animals. They're going to do everything they can to minimize that

because that reduces the growth efficiency, and it's all about efficiency in commercial production. So, again, in that lifeless, in that hypothetical lifeless space, you could eat the raw meat all the time. It's just like you're, there's no damage from the actual meat. It's just stuff that you're ingesting that

accompanies it. Yeah, I think that's a fair way to say that. Right. I have another, I have a question that kind of relates back also to the idea of crate-raised veal. But, okay, so let's look at human beings. So somebody who doesn't do any exercise whatsoever and just kind of sits around. And then someone who lifts weights all the time and has stronger, bigger muscle. So if we look at the—

This is a cannibalism question? You bet. I'm glad you— Who tastes better in that office? Who did their PhD? We need the next one. After the turtle guy, I want a human meat guy. I'm glad you're asking the question because I was wondering the same thing.

Like which people taste best? Yeah, totally. If you have a diet of Froot Loops, or if you have salad. So if we look at the equivalent of that in animals, an animal that maybe doesn't move around

a lot compared to same animal, same species, but that moves around a lot more or um or i don't know cats climbing trees yeah we hear about people talk about why is the chicken and like in rural mexico the chicken's so good be like well it's well exercised right like like if it if an animal has i don't know is stronger has more, is potentially more contracted muscle, like how does that all, or is well exercised or not, how does that have an effect, if any, on toughness? Or you can still manipulate the meat afterwards and the muscle fiber afterwards to get it to be tender.

Good. I'll answer that, but I just want to tease you guys. I always have a conversation with my students, and that is that sooner or later when you're talking to the public, they become closet scientists, and I think they know science. But the basis of your question is actually twofold. Number one, does exercise make meat less tender? And then the other dimension of that is the inactivity means that they're burning up less energy. And if they're consuming the same, they're creating more fat.

And so that latter part is true. The less exercise, the less movement, the more fat is going to be produced on the same diet, right? In terms of exercise, creating tougher connective tissue and the rest of that, those differences, if they exist, are very subtle and not meaningful. You would have a far greater difference in tenderness from one muscle to another than you would from one animal to another because of exercise. Okay. So pretty much, you know, given more or less exercise among people in the office, we may all taste about the same. Yeah. Presuming you're the same age. Right. Yep. as we may all taste about the same. Presuming you're the same age.

Right, right, yep. In a real quick, simple way, what's the difference between the dark meat with poultry? What's the difference between the dark meat and the white meat? It's that amount of myoglobin that's present. So not all muscle cells are the same. Some have more myoglobin than the other. So the dark meat just has more of that myoglobin and biologically typically has a little bit more lipid, a little bit more fat in there as well. Neither one is very fat, but there might be another percentage or two of fat in there. Mostly the color difference is just because there's more of that uh oxygen binding

pigment in the meat can you explain the function of glands that you find when you're butchering something and are glands as prominent in domestic animals as they are wild ones well yeah spencer it's not like you produce more glands from being domestic well i don't know go ahead i'm thinking about like with a white-tailed deer like they use their glands to mark territory and things like that but a more active gland yeah well i'll buy that because you smell a fox and you smell your dog named close to the same thing right go on he's right so in this case you're talking about scent glands, and we really don't have scent glands in domestic animals to deal with too much. Really? Yes.

But if you're talking about lymph glands, those lymph nodes, lymph glands, they exist in all of the animals. They're probably a little bit more visible, easy to see in a leaner animal. And so you probably see those more often in game. And what is the function of those? Well, that's an immune function. That's how the animal sustains health. When you get a cold, you have an immune response that helps you fight against it. So there's a whole system in the body

called the lymph system that moves that fluid around to help fight disease and injury and the rest of that kind of thing. So when you sprain your ankle, it swells up. That's lymph fluid pooling in your ankle as a result. You know, there's a little gland that's always hiding out in the back leg of a deer and you actually got to take it apart to get that thing out yeah let's say you forget or don't or you never knew about it and just you must have been eating them your whole life um is that necessarily bad for you i i don't i wouldn't be too concerned about a health concern i suspect it probably has a quality effect on taste and flavor and that kind of thing that same guy that told me the great turkey story about shipping into minneapolis and barrels he had a little custom slaughter plant and i was down there with him one time and we were picking

out uh sweetbreads the thymus gland correct right we're picking out sweetbreads and he was we were he was slaughtered a bunch of young cattle ands, and he was slaughtering a bunch of young cattle. And the guy that he was slaughtering for didn't want them. So he had me down because he said, you can get all you want if you want to come down. And so he was showing me how to separate the skin and prepare them. And he was saying that that, I said, well, why are they not good on the older animals? And he said that it turns waxy. Is this something you had any exposure to? Well, I have had sweetbreads, and I can tell you that on the

grill in particular, they can be quite delicious. Oh my, they're incredible. Yeah. And it makes sense to me that as the animal gets older, that possibly the saturation of the lipids might change. I don't really know, but I think it's probably less waxy and more dense, harder fat that's present within that area. But that's a little bit of guess on my part. Yeah. I've always sought to experiment with this, but never have as if on a yearling deer to find that sweet bread and prepare it and see if it's any good. And I'm sure someone listening has done this, but I've never heard of people doing sweet breads on anything but cattle. Well, lamb, I think people do lamb sweet breads. They're a little bit hard to find. You got to know what you're looking for. They're not very big,

particularly in game animals. So I think that'd be a bigger challenge. Why is beef tallow good and venison tallow bad? Well, I've never had venison tallow, but it has to do with, I would expect, it's a difference in what fatty acids are made up of the tissue, right? And so if you think about something like chicken or pork fat, it's pretty soft. When you go to the beef carcass, it's a lot more firm. And so it's more saturated in the beef animal. Incidentally, it depends on where on the carcass you get. The fat in the brisket area is softer than fat that's over the loin. And the fat that's around the kidney is harder than everything. And so there are differences within the animal as well. But if you have an unsaturated

fat, a soft fat, like pork, like poultry, I would expect like game, that fat will oxidize more quickly. It's biologically disposed to do so. It interacts with oxygen from the air. Oxidized lipids are described by us as rancid. And so there could very well be a flavor difference there as well. Oh, no, I think you're onto it. I'll tell you some of the weird, when we talk about deer tallow, like I'll tell you some of the attributes that we find that differ from the attributes of beef fat. It is, the most fat you find is over the rump. So kind of like on top of the rump alongside either side of the spine, you'll find these big flat cakes of fat.

It's firm, right you could you could cut into squares it's kind of flaky like when it flakes you can sort of when it's cold or whatever you can kind of flake it away and hold it in your fingers and it doesn't melt between your fingers at all when you eat it it like if you take a sip like if you were eating a venison rib and then you had a sip of ice water that fat will set up and solidify all over on the inside of your mouth um and to the point where you have to almost manually scrape it off the inside of your mouth and finally it is good it's okay fresh but it rots in your freezer yeah and you pull it out later and it's changed man like like six venice deer fat in your freezer for six months comes out way different than when it went in but the meat is not changed yeah it that, I'm sure that's that concentration of fats and oxidation that takes place.

Oxidation happens in your freezer as well. So that's entirely consistent with what I would expect. You know what's weird? You know what really goes bad in a freezer is bear fat. I don't know why. You can render it into like really nice lard but it goes bad if the unrendered just the straight fat will rot in your freezer i don't know if pork fat does but i uh pork fat will probably at a little bit of a slower rate um but you know this is one of those things where we could talk

just briefly about packaging right a lot of times we we wrap it up in sort of that waxy-coated or plastic-coated butcher paper, which doesn't get the air out, right? Whereas if you seal it inside a vacuum bag, a plastic bag, and vacuum seal that, which is how things are done commercially, you've gotten rid of almost all the air that's there. And that will extend either the shelf life when it's fresh or the shelf life in the freezer as well, because it minimizes that oxidation process. Go ahead, Spencer. So are you replicating that when you freeze something in water? It's very common among fishermen to take a bag of fillets and fill it with water and then throw that in your freezer

because it doesn't allow any air to come in contact with the meat. Is that doing the same thing? Yeah, that's the same principle. I would argue you probably still get some air through there, but it would certainly reduce the problem you know we used to in the old days we would just wrap red meat in waxed freezer paper which created all kinds of problem like you just get freezer burned corners you know right now i'll do one of two things where i typically will wrap it in plastic wrap like saran wrap, in order to get as much of the air out as I can. And then put it in the wax freezer paper, which I think is protective, like protects it, the integrity of the plastic wrap underneath when people are like, you know, shuffling around in the freezer. And also it decreases light or eliminates light from

penetrating in um do you feel that that system is is like a a good system for home use sure it's not quite as effective as the vacuum packaging we're talking about but the secret is uh you use the magic word saran like everything else not all plastic wrap is created equal. Saran is an oxygen barrier. And in fact, those vacuum package bags I'm talking about, they are layered. And the center layer is a saran-type product to prevent oxygen from penetrating. Oh, I didn't know that. There are some plastic wrap that will let air through and will let oxygen through and water through.

And so it depends on which plastic wrap you're using. How do you know that you're getting the right kind? You know, the easiest way is to, if it if it's, if, uh, it's not necessarily a brand endorsement, but Saran is a brand name for the oxygen barrier film. Um, the other thing you can do, um, for example, if you make like, uh, if you take avocados and chop them up and you cover them with plastic wrap, some of that plastic wrap, it will turn brown very, very quickly, and others it will not. And so that's an indication of oxygen permeability as well.

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always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by That's a sweet function. try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meat. OnXMaps.com slash meat. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. When you thaw out a piece of frozen meat, like a backstrap, and there's all that liquid in the plate what is that just water that's water and myoglobin there are a few other proteins that are in there water soluble enzymes that kind of thing it doesn't compromise the nutritional quality of the product at all but there's no reason to hold on to it you know the big thing i remind people is um

the raw meat might be on that plate. Once you get it cooked, make sure you use a clean plate. So would it be a bad practice then to freeze something, thaw it out, refreeze it again, and then thaw it out again? Are you creating a worse product? Yes. What happens there? Okay, go on. You're driving moisture from the product. And usually when you thaw it out, you're exposing it to oxygen. So you get more oxidation as well. So both of those things would be negative in terms of eating experience. But not a huge negative. Yeah. I mean, you can refreeze me yeah i do i like i've long been i i always have people tell me you can't do that you can't do that but i'm like well then i should be deader than dead because we do it all the time like we'll thaw big bags so if we but let's say you bone a deer like a deer shoulder

out um we bone the deer shoulder out and you don't have time for whatever reason, just because of life. And you put all the meat into a gallon size Ziploc bag, squeeze the air out, put it in your freezer for whatever, a month. And then you finally get time. You're going to make some sausage, pull it back out, thaw it, make sausage or burger or whatever repackage it and then it goes back into the freezer now i'll like sure like something must be lost but i would if i pepsi challenged you on it i don't think you'd be able to pick it out for the most part those subtle differences particularly if you're going from a whole product to a ground product. I think you're safe by doing that. You know, you want to think a little bit about thawing. If you're one of those

guys who throws it on the kitchen counter and lets it thaw for the rest of the day, if there's any bacteria in there, that's not particularly food safety practices we'd want to encourage. I'd say put it in the fridge, let it get partially thawed, cut off what you need, and then refreeze the rest so that you know that you haven't gotten in a temperature zone where lots of extra spoilage bacteria take place. But the practice that you've talked about, people do that all the time. You're absolutely right. And I think I was trying to point out that it's a matter of degrees of differences and it's not a binary yes, no, do, don't, live, die kind of decision on that thing. Chris, what does the science say about marinating meat? Can you get a liquid to penetrate like a roast and change the flavor of it? Yeah. So there's two reasons to marinate. One is to change flavor and one is to tenderize the meat. And so if you're going to change flavor,

then pretty much whatever flavor you like, you can marinate the meat for an hour or two, you'll get a nice surface coating and it will alter the taste of the product in your cooking. And that's easy. You can do that with, we do similar things with dry rubs, right? Where you just rub the spices on the outside and so forth. But most of the time when we think in meat science about marinating, we're thinking about how are you making that meat more tender? The secret goes back to that connective tissue, that silvery tissue on the outside that goes throughout the whole muscle. You can think of that connective tissue like a fishnet or like a harness so that when the individual cell contracts, that connective tissue moves with it. And that's how we

get movement of the whole body or the whole arm as a result of contraction in the live animal. So when you marinate, you want to tenderize that connective tissue. That works best if you have an acid-based marinade. So a wine or a vinegar or a citric kind of a base, even a soy sauce, those kinds of marinades will enhance the tenderness of the product. The secret, as you just pointed out, is how deep and how far does that really penetrate into the muscle? And I tell you, it doesn't go that far, right? You can marinate for eight hours and only be an eighth or a quarter of an inch into the tissue. So it's best if you marinate thinner, smaller pieces. If you want to get real sophisticated, you can you can get a syringe and you can actually inject some of that marinate into a larger, a larger piece of meat.

And that will work as well. The last thing on marinades I would mention is that there are some fruits that have enzymes in them that tenderize meat. And so, for example, kiwi fruit or raw pineapple, even papaya and figs, all of those have enzymes that will attack the meat. Now, if it's canned pineapple, well, by canning, you've inactivated the enzyme. It doesn't work anymore. Oh, huh. As a fresh product, if you add that to the dish, you can tenderize meat in that way. You know, you might give me an answer here that I don't believe and Noah's wrong,

but can you increase moisture by marinating or brining? This is a hot debate in the culinary world. I'm not sure whether you would increase for marinating. You might be able to get a little bit more moisture in there, but, you know, you're trying to get water to move to a place that's already 75% moisture. So I wouldn't think you get very much of an effect just by marinating to enhance moisture. If you're brining, look, salt dries out meat, right? That's how we used to preserve meat years and years ago is packet and salt. and so salt tends to draw moisture out of the product now if you mix up a salt solution and you inject it in the meat okay you've added more

moisture there but if you're just putting a piece of meat into a brine the the that you're getting the reverse effect you're getting moisture pulled out but don't they like don't they sell you know how sometimes uh you can get a turkey and it actually has an ingredients list yeah because they've they've they inject it with a brine yes and and that's like specifically to make it moist right but that's just you're just like physically sticking water in there yes but you you're also adding salt, which is a great flavor potentiator, right? It enhances flavor. And so if you give somebody a piece of meat with salt and without salt, most of the time they'll tell you the one with salt tastes better, is more tender, more juicy,

more flavorful. Plus there are other ingredients that go into that turkey that would help the moisture stay in the meat instead of just run out. So I think we're dealing with the difference in terminology here and what you're really doing and how it's getting done. Gotcha. What if you like pulverize kiwi and pineapple and you put some meat in a bowl of that so there's no sodium so you're not having water come out of it but you're having it in an enzyme bath of liquid you i i tell you that i have cooked meat with honest in a skillet with kiwi before that I could eat with a spoon. Really? Maybe that's our next recipe.

It wasn't very good because it was mush. It was mush. All right. Aging. It must be real. Like dry aging is beneficial. Hit us with some do's and don'ts. Well, so when you are aging, you are allowing the enzymes that are naturally present within the meat to break down the protein that enhances tenderness. So if you could age in one of those vacuum bags where almost no moisture comes out, or you could age in air.

If you're aging in air, we call it dry aging. If you're aging in one of those vacuum packages, we call it wet aging. And in both cases, the tenderization process is the same. And as I said earlier, you'll get a great benefit in the first week or so or two. And then after that, the benefits of aging are reduced. You don't see, you've already tenderized it to a large extent to the most that it will occur. It will continue to improve, but not very much. So from an aging standpoint for tenderness, it's enzymes that do the work. When we dry age, we're putting meat typically on a rack and we leave it set for a period of time. And what happens is the moisture on the surface of that cut evaporates fairly quickly. In fact,

over three or four days, you can get a very nice dry crust on the outside of that meat. The longer you store it after that, you'll still lose moisture. And two things happen during that aging period from a taste standpoint. One is you're concentrating the flavors because you're removing water and everything else stays behind. But the other thing is you're actually creating flavors. Proteins get broken down into amino acids and some amino acids are like the ingredients in MSG. They're flavor potentiators as well, enhancers. You get some oxidation flavors that go on as you dry age as well. So the taste of a dry aged piece of meat is profoundly different than the taste of a wet-aged piece of meat. So I think, like a lot of other things, if someone says, I'm going to dry age, they need to understand why they are dry aging, what they're going to accomplish when they do that. Now, when you dry

age, you lose the weight. I mentioned before 15% or more more but then you've also got this hard crust on the outside that you've got to trim off and throw away do you guys ever call that the rind yeah oh good that'd be so you're talking about maybe another 15 so you're probably going to lose 30 of the weight of that muscle when you dry age. 20 to 30%. A guy once served me a piece of Audad. He had an Audad shoulder that he had aged for 18 months. And once you got through all the dried out stuff, there was a strip of meat inside there that was about the size of a cigar. And it tasted like blue cheese

i mean it was the cheesiest strongest most potent thing um he was just kind of experiment with how long can you how long can you go but that felt like a real petri dish you know yeah but no ill effect. We ate it raw. My goodness. You're braver than I am. Is mold always a bad sign when you're dry aging something? No, but it makes me nervous. Some mold can be toxic, particularly the black molds. There is a gray mold that tends to come on, and some dry aging experts will say that that enhances or alters the flavor. Incidentally, they've done some testing on some molds, and one of them is associated with blue cheese. It's the same kind of mold that can

take place. But I would emphasize, you don't have to have mold to have a very good dry-aged product. In fact, I sort of feel like if you've got mold, to me, that's an indication that maybe you don't have the most sanitary cleaning system set up before you started to dry-age in the first place. I'm not a big fan of mold, but I'll tell you there are some scientists who say it does accentuate and add a little bit to the flavor as well. A friend of mine who was a chef, he always advised me that the only mold that bothers him

is the black fuzzy kind. So he always, that's true. Not the only one, but that black fuzzy is bad. That's correct. What about aging temperature? I always hear butchers stress that you shouldn't let the ambient temperature get below freezing because it slows down the aging process. So you're not accomplishing what you're trying to do. What is like the ideal temperature for aging meat?

Yeah, that's exactly right. If it's frozen, water is not going to move, right, very easily. And so you want to be above freezing. I would say 34, 35 degrees or somewhere in that ballpark would be about right. If you get much higher than that, then you start to get bacterial growth and the rest of that. What's the real danger zone? Well, anything over 40 for certain would be too high.

Oh, okay. But if you're going to store it for a week or two, I would shoot for the mid-30s, frankly, for that very reason. Here's the secret. If it starts to get slimy, that's bacterial growth. And if it's dry and it's not slimy, then you have less bacterial growth. It's not zero, but you have much less spoilage bacteria growing if it's not slimy than if it is. You know, there are certain little tricks that people try where they'll say like out in the field, you can rub black pepper all over a quarter to help preserve it. Or do people make these little packages? It's some kind of, I don't know what, some kind of acid or something. It looks like a little drink package and you mix

that in a water bottle and shake it up. I've messed with this stuff and I wasn't happy with the results because it kind of looked like if you put lime juice all over meat. But anyways, they shake it up and you bathe a quarter of meat and that stuff, and it's supposed to inhibit bacterial growth. Would you have faith in any of these methods as actually accomplishing anything? I'm not too enthusiastic about pepper from a preservative standpoint, but I will tell you that, in fact, a light organic acid will reduce bacteria on the surface. In fact, that's commercially done as well. A light mist, usually a lactic acid or a citric acid, for example, could work as well, tends to reduce spoilage bacteria. And I know sometimes the surface of the meat will get that

lime juice appearance you're talking about where it kind of looks washed out and the rest of that but that's only surface okay by the time you cook it you won't even know that that acid was there you know i i realized i misspoke and i didn't and i caught it when you mentioned it is when we did this you were right it was in a spray bottle yeah it was it was a product that you mix in a spray bottle and and it's funny because what turned me off was that lime juicy look but I didn't think about the fact that that was very surface level yeah it's pretty it's pretty thin layer, but that's really all you need. The bigger challenge for me is you could do that, but now you've got a carcass that's low in bacterial load. What do you do with it, right? If you're going to go lay it in the bed of a pickup and drive it home, you sort of kind of worked against yourself right now maybe a better way would be take it home and

hang it and then spray it right once you're done transporting it once you're done with transport alternatively alternatively go ahead and get the animal but leave the hide on and don't take the hide off till you get home then when you take the off, you can spray it and be ready to go. I realize an animal that's gone into rigor mortis is harder to skin, of course. So there's the downside to that. Oh, yeah. Man, they skin nice when they're brand new. Yeah, you bet.

Chris, would you mind talking a bit about some of the research that you've been doing and some of the work you've been doing recently and any new discoveries there? So, yeah, there's probably three or four things I can talk about here. I'll do this briefly. And if you have questions, we can go deeper. in our laboratory, 12 dry aging chambers that are the most tightly controlled dry aging chambers in the world. We can control relative humidity. We can control airspeed. We can control level of oxygen. We can measure the weight of the meat once a second for six weeks if we want to do that. And of course, it's in a cooler where we can control temperature. There's a lot of lore about dry aging, a lot of art, if you will, but we're trying to push science forward. And so we've learned a lot

about how moisture moves out of that meat. A lot of people think, for example, that rind or that crust prevents moisture loss. It does not. We're learning a lot of different things about dry aging that has not been seen before. And we continue to do that kind of work. We also have some work we just finished up that if you think about these meal kit services, you get a package of meat in there and most of the time that package of meat is brown. It's not very attractive in color. And so we did a whole project on how do you maintain bright red color in frozen meat? And so there's some tricks you can do if you understand the biology to do that. We have a lot of people feed different kinds of feed to animals.

And we are where this is really deep biochemistry. But we're looking at the chemistry now of what happens during that rigor mortis process. And right after that, that tenderizes meat. So we're looking at the enzymes and how that whole process gets controlled. And then lastly, we did a project here. It's been a number of years now where we went through and characterized with a group of scientists, not just me, we characterized a lot of different muscles in the beef carcass. Out of that, the flat iron steak was identified.

There were a number of other cuts as well, but that's probably the one that's most well known. And so when we do research in my laboratory, I'm a quality oriented scientist in meats. And so I'm looking at meat quality from the standpoint of what makes that product taste better? What gives it better flavor? What makes it more tender? What makes it longer shelf life? What gives us the right color? What gives us the optimal use of that animal? And we talked before about respecting the products that we get. And I get frustrated when we use the wrong muscle for the wrong recipe, because you are either undervaluing one or overvaluing

the other one. And so trying to make sure that we use the right part in the right place in the right way. And to me, that is a win-win-win. It's a win for the people who produce the animals. It's a win for the people that are marketing those products. And best of all, it's a win for those people who are consuming those products. I think the same thing about your listeners, quite honestly. They've gone to expense, they've gone to energy, they've gone to effort to go out and get them an animal. And part of it is the experience, which we all enjoy hiking and being outside and all the rest of that. But I would love for them to end up with the highest quality product they can so that the ultimate end of the experience is a very satisfying one as well.

You know, Chris, I don't think we talked about this. What school are you at? I'm at the University ofaska in the animal science department okay so i know you guys got snapper turtles there now when you steer you're talking about different muscle groups right like different the qualities of different muscles when you steer one of your graduate students do you have graduate students yes okay when you steer one of them into snapping turtle work i want you to remind them that it is lore among snapping turtle people that there are is it five or seven there are like seven there are seven distinct meats inside of a snapping turtle so since it's low all low-hanging fruit in snapping turtle meat research, that might be a good dissertation.

You have to think of a good title for the dissertation, but it would be something like testing the qualitative yada yada of the seven kinds of snapping turtle meat. Well, first of all, I have to locate the snapping turtle meat foundation they have deep pockets chris don't worry spencer and i will start that organization now yeah and do some fundraising so we can fund the research i've never known what they mean by the seven types like pork chicken beef things like that but there's there's well to their credit to their credit to the to the it looks like i'm talking just looking at it like you know the the back straps that run down the inside of a turtle inside that little honeycomb bone yeah very very

white very stringy you can tear it apart by hand then like their legs have some intensely dark meat the neck is visually very different there's something there chris's student will find it and he'll report back to us and then chris probably do some dry aging on turtle studies there we go so you know i might also tell you this story that i was contacted a number of years ago by a scientist who was working in Latin America. And he was looking at what was the motivation for hunters. They would go out hunting bushmeat and they would go out hunting monkeys and they would walk by howler monkeys and they would hike for a week in order to get spider monkeys. And he was trying to figure out how much energy it took them to go harvest one type over another. And he couldn't figure out what was the difference in these two animals. Well, it turns out spider monkeys eat fruit and howler monkeys eat a lot of tree bark, rich in tannins.

And we actually came very close to having a research project on monkey meat taste because I'm convinced those howler monkeys had very bitter flavored meat. And the spider monkeys was going to be, you know, much more desirable meat products. However, like everything else, the funding fell through for that project and we didn't get to do it. That's too bad. I was with, I was with the Chimane and we went monkey hunting. They, their favorite is the spider monkey. Second favorite was red howler. We got a red howler and ate it, but the way they cook things, it really,

everything winds up being very similar because they'll dry it, they smoke it, then boil it, and they do a lot of processes to it that really change it. There were other monkeys that I thought, when we encountered them, I thought, man, this monkey's in trouble. But they're very dismissive of it. There were other monkeys that I thought when we encountered them, I thought, man, this monkey's in trouble, but they're very dismissive of it. And then we encountered a possum

after they got a red howler. And I thought, man, no one wants to eat monkeys. There are people that at least like possums. This possum is doomed. And they were very dismissive of anyone that would ever go near a possum and stroll down past it it would be a real rich area of inquiry for someone to look into the qualitative nature of how it's viewed uh what tastes good and how culturally subjective that is. I spent some time with the Chupac Eskimos. They like tougher meat. When butchering an animal, this part is good. It's very chewy. This part is not good.

It's very tender. They especially like the tendon that supports the head that comes off the spine. That's good because that's nice and chewy. And they'd be fascinated to understand how much of this stuff is culturally overlaid. And if there really is any sort of human, you know, any sort of objective reality about what tastes good? That's a great question. There are cultures in the world that favor the less tender product. There are also cultures in the world that favor the stronger, more intense flavors that come from pasture-raised beef or wild game,

for example. And interesting on our monkey meat conversation, you touched on, I think, a really critical point. And that was not only would they kind of dismiss the monkeys, but if some hunter actually shot one, then that person was widely disparaged as well. Oh, is that right? Huh? Yeah. So there was definitely a social aspect to it to go on top of, of everything else, as you mentioned. Okay. Corinne, let's close out with the future.

Okay. This is Corinne's been dying to talk about this. Well, okay. So we've done some blind taste testing around here with fake meat. And I think overwhelmingly as soon as you have a bite of the imposter meat, I mean, it's just so obvious. Taste, texture, smell, everything that would go into one's experience of eating something is just so clearly not any kind of meat. So how much meat science goes into the development of these products? And from your perspective, how possible is it on a cellular level to really create animal flesh out of nothing that is animal material?

How much time do we have? Well, first of all, there have been food scientists who have contributed to those products. Not too many meat scientists, but there are food scientists. That's too bad. Maybe they would have had better products. But you know, within that, if you, we started our conversation talking about Warner Bratzler shear, an objective measure of tenderness. If you look at the muscles in a beef carcass, there is more than a twofold difference in shear force from one muscle to the other. So even within an animal, there's a wide range of tenderness and texture. I tend to agree with you. Every one of those non-meat products that we've talked about has not met my standard for what I care to eat.

I like to say, sort of tongue in cheek, everybody's entitled to their own stupid opinion, right? And as a food industry, I don't object to offering a variety of products, even if I myself don't care for them. But mostly the comments I've just made are relevant regarding plant-based substitutes for meat. There is some effort going on to use cells and grow cells to create a meat product like you're talking about. But just as we have a twofold difference in tenderness within the body itself in tenderness. The structures and cellular architecture it takes to build those muscles, they are very, very far away from being able to mimic a meat-like structure in my judgment. And so certainly as a meat scientist, I don't feel threatened by those products. Mostly I am, I guess I'm a little disappointed and frustrated by the marketing claims that are made

regarding those kinds of products. Time and again, people talk about, oh, these products are, they're healthier for the environment, they're greener. But the reality is, when you do a full life cycle analysis, live animal production is a very efficient way to convert plants to meat. And in Nebraska, we've been a state for over 150 years. We have farms in the state that have been in families for more than seven generations. You can't possibly produce animals for seven generations if it's not done in a sustainable way. And so my frustration with the product line is more along the disparagement of what takes place with agricultural production. And frankly, I think it's a little bit deceiving in a lot of ways compared to what we have,

whether it's game animals or whether it's commercially raised animals. Those animals are out there grazing pasture. They're eating grain. And they have the opportunity to give us this wonderful, desirable eating experience if we'll respect and take care and manage those animals appropriately. That's, frankly, that's what my whole career has been about, is managing the product. Chris, thanks for coming on. It's truly been a pleasure. I honestly appreciate so much

the chance to talk about this. As you mentioned earlier, we have a lot of misconceptions going on out there, and it's enjoyable for me to kind of explain and educate a little bit. Well, I'm going to warn you that I'm probably going to steal traffic and misconceptions because it's such a big part of our lives to speculate about why things taste good and bad. Well, then we just need to call them again. We'll build up another list of things we've heard from people, and we'll come back and check with you. That'd be great. I'd be happy to visit.

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