SC - Bacon'd Herring-OT-Some menu examples

[LHG, JRG]

All right. Now you've done it. You're for it now, my lad. You have activated
automated program section 46-z-12, The Ham Talk.,,,,<<<merciful SNIP>>>
...................Adamantius 
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

*******************************************
*******************************************

Good Cooks all,

I come to you with a more modern addition to the useful description Adamantius offers.  High heat cooking also melts the callogen (connective tissues) in meats.  Ham, being dried forever or cured or whatever, can create rather inedible thin strands of leather in the meats during the curing and drying.  The long cooking time will be needed to give the entire piece time to heat through and gelatinize the callogen.  It also gives time for moisture to permeate to facilitate the whole cooking process. 

 Roasting and baking are also different in that modern ovens trap the moisture form cooking and gives an entirely different texture due to quasi-steaming.  Roasting is a DRY process that gives a whole different flavor and texture.  I open the oven slightly and crank up the heat to approximate roasting techniques.  They used crusts and covers to retain the steam, where we need to release steam to perform roasting.

 I paraphrase this form info I found in "CookWise", a truly enlightening book that offers food science explanations for why we do what we do to prepare food and why food does what it does when we cook and/or prepare it (don't have the author's name with me at work, which is on the tip of my cerebellum-- can post later).

This may not be THE answer, but it sure explains some of what we do to meats......and why my pot roasts go from leather to heaven in that last half hour :o)    (yeah, you have to balance the moisutre loss by shrinkage of protein strands as well...but that is another story).

Rambling on in pace e bene,

niccolo difrancesco

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================