Cook Meats Slowly As far back as 1947—50 years ago—Adelle Davis, in her Let's Cook It Right, pled with her readers to adopt a simple method for cooking meats that would enhance their flavor at the same time it would avoid what she understood then to be the serious health consequences of typical methods. Almost 50 years of use for some of us, along with mounting research evidence that enlarge her case, motivate us to want to share Adelle's method. We are very suspicious that a large part of the problems that have become identified with animal protein and its associated fat are the result of a combination of human/cultural mistakes: the way the animals are raised in the first place (especially the high grain diets) and the way we cook their meat.
The core insight of Adelle's method for meat cookery is that proteins are seriously damaged by high temperature. This means that their food value is damaged, but also that there is a range of molecular alterations which have additional serious consequences for our health. We would encourage anyone to read her essay, as old as it is, and to watch for new information which continues to appear on the research front.
We want to describe here only one of her low-temperature cooking methods (she offers a variety appropriate for different meats and dishes). This one which we've used for years, we use routinely to prepare poultry and beef. Our practice, for maximum economy of time and of energy use is to cook a roasting pan full of chicken, turkey, pork, beef cuts (even several pounds of hamburger) at once. This procedure also permits easier and more complete removal of excess, unwanted fat.
We wish there were a way to measure the difference in quantity as well as the quality of the flavor extracted from a pound of meat with this method compared to conventional methods. Adelle describes the technical reasons for the retention of flavor, and our taste test bears her out every time! Having so many cups of broth to use in soups or gravies is a wonderful luxury. But of course the most important consequence comes in the benefit to our health.
- Place completely thawed meat in a roasting pan with a good lid.
- Place pan in an oven pre-warmed to 300 . It may be wise to check the accuracy of your oven with an oven thermometer.
- After one hour, reduce heat to 170 and "roast" for 8 to 18 hours. You can tell when meat is done by punching a thick part: any pink in the liquid would indicate insufficient doneness. One of the surest ways to test when poultry is done is that one can easily remove a leg, for instance, without any need for a knife or other utensil. Another real advantage is that the meat is not damaged by staying in the oven longer, as the temperature is not high enough to hurt it.
- When done, and quickly after removal from the oven, we tilt the roaster sharply to let liquid with its fat content, drain as completely as possible from the meat. We put this liquid quickly into jars and proceed to package the meat for present or future use, removing skin and still-obvious fat, along with bone, all of which we simmer for a few hours to extract further nutrient. We add this liquid to the containers of meat juices, letting fat in each container rise to the top, serving there as a seal during storage and then easily and completely removable for discard.