local eating

How you cook your steak makes the difference between having a healthy meal and you-may-as-well-be-eating-mystery-meat.

Overcooking burns nutrients, and so the proteins, essential fatty acids, and vitamins that your body needs get destroyed. In their place, new chemicals that weren’t in there before get formed, compounds like cyclic amines, lipid hydroxides, and glycated proteins. Some of these byproducts of overcooking are carcinogens, and others damage your blood vessels, especially the blood vessels in your kidneys.

So how do you cook meat right?

To guarantee that fish, chicken, steaks, oysters and all your other favorites retain their nutrients, you have to cook everything gently. The best way to prevent overcooking is to ensure that the meats stay moist. One of the biggest mistakes people make when cooking red meat especially is to try to “cook the fat out.” The liquid that oozes or steams out of a roast, a steak, or a hamburger does contain a little fat, but mostly it’s water and water-soluble nutrients including protein and minerals. By the way, those nutrients have flavor, so keeping them around ensures a more complex, intensely flavored meal. Here’s what I recommend:

• Cook steaks and fish rare
• Leave the skin on chicken. Skin keep the moisture from escaping, prevents overdrying and it tastes great!
• Leave the yolks in your eggs just a little bit runny
• When baking, baste often
• Stewing and braising are healthier options than frying

So if you want to be healthy, you don’t need to cut meat out of your diet. You only need to cook it right!

Bon Appetite

What’s the secret to a great steak?

For one thing, you need to have a good sense of timing to cook it just right – but that’s no secret. The real trick to enjoying a super steak is having a great butcher, and having him or her nearby so your steak is fresh and never, ever frozen.

Medeiros Farms – Locally Grown Beef, Chicken, and Eggs

Here in Kalaheo we are lucky to have three talented butchers…or well they’re women so maybe they’re butcheresses? Anyway, they take care of the dirty work of turning those cute little guys we drive by on our way home (the cows) into pieces of food. Their tools are not all saws. One of the most important tools to creating tasty beef is time.

There will be no beef until it’s time…

One of the dirty little secrets of the industrial beef industry is, after they’re done torturing cows by confining them into filthy concrete windowless boxes and forcing them to survive on feed that their digestive systems rebel against (causing chronic diarrhea), they follow this unnatural and inhumane practice with another one that’s just as bad or worse: tenderizing the meat with chemicals – sometimes injecting them into the cow’s bloodstream while still alive. This is all in the name of saving time. The cows get fat fast, just like you would if you ate nothing but corn and soy products (for reasons described elsewhere). Pumped full of antibiotics so they don’t die from all the infections they’re exposed to, they can be brought to slaughter weight in half the time of cattle raised on grass. And, because every second that passes by without product being produced is an unforgivable waste, rather than tenderizing the meat naturally, by aging it, they use chemical enzymes that break down protein.

Someone has probably written their PhD thesis on how aging versus chemical tenderizing makes a culinary difference, something to do with water loss over time. I know for sure that, when it comes to flavor, the steaks we get from Medeiros Farms – locally raised on Kauai grass and aged the old fashioned way – are out of this world. Compared to the grocery store’s they are…well, there’s no comparison. You have to try one and see what I mean.