Braising: A magical transformation from tough to tender

Braising may seem like culinary alchemy – and for good reason. The cook tosses an inherently tough cut of meat into a pot, adds a wee bit of stock or other liquid and leaves the pot, covered and unattended, in a slow oven or over low heat. A couple of hours later, she removes the lid and voilà! Unlike medieval chemists who toiled fruitlessly to turn base metals into gold, the cook reveals an improbable transformation: The meat, once sinewy and indigestible, is now so tender it needs no knife – in fact, it hardly needs chewing except to relish its succulent texture. To be clear, assembling the ingredients requires no mystical skill. Though white meat and some vegetables are commonly braised, scrappier cuts of red meat – round, chuck or shoulder – benefit most from the process. The meat, either in one big chunk or in bite-size pieces, is set atop the fond de braise, a cushion of aromatic veggies such as onions and carrots. Stock, wine, beer or other juices are added in small quantities to partially cover the meat, and a bouquet garni – a bundle of herbs and vegetables like fresh parsley, thyme and bay leaves – is then tucked into the broth to impart flavor. What’s magical – or at least less understood – is the process by which braising transmutes meat from tough to tender. It’s very different from roasting, which is a dry-heat cooking technique. My early braising wisdom was gleaned in culinary school, almost entirely from Madeleine Kamman’s 1971 classic cookbook and reference guide, “The Making of a Cook.” There, she insists that the meat must first be seared (browned quickly over high heat) so that “its juices ... concentrate at the center.” Once the meat and stock are in the pot, she fits the pot with what she calls an “inverted foil lid,” essentially a piece of foil that sits flush on the meat’s surface with its ends extending up the sides of the pan. She then covers the pot tightly with its own lid and sets it to bake in a 325-degree oven. According to Kamman, the inverted foil lid traps steam close to the meat and creates a microenvironment of high pressure, which “bears on the meat fibers and slowly pries them open.” The juices, once trapped in the center of the meat by the sear, heat up and gradually make their way from the interior to the outside of the meat, breaking apart fibrous connective tissue and thereby tenderizing the meat. She crafts a compelling story, but it’s difficult to reconcile her explanation with the more scientific rationale put forth by food chemistry guru Harold McGee in his latest edition of “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen.” Like Kamman, McGee starts his braise by searing the meat, but only because the caramelization of meat proteins lends flavor. The widely held notion that searing seals in meat juices is just plain wrong, writes McGee. “The continuing sizzle of meat in the pan [after it is seared] ... is the sound of moisture continually escaping.” McGee goes further, asserting that the primary tenderizer is not trapped steam or localized high pressure but rather sustained low temperature, ideally below the boiling point. When the internal meat temperature registers between 160 and 180 degrees, the collagen in tough connective tissue starts to dissolve into soft, unctuous gelatin, and the meat fibers, once bonded tightly together by the connective tissue, become easier to separate and, thus, more tender. To keep the internal meat temperature in the ideal collagen-melting range, McGee recommends setting the oven to between 200 and 250 degrees and keeping the pot lid slightly ajar. At an oven temperature as high as that which Kamman suggests, the outer portions of the meat will “overcook badly,” he contends. So what does one do when noted food luminaries clash in such evident disagreement? Put the experts to the test. I recently prepared my Guinness Braised Beef according to each method, and while my experiment didn’t shed any new light on the tenderizing process, it did reveal a clear winner. After two hours in the oven, the meat by Kamman’s method fell into luscious pieces at the gentle touch of a tine. But was McGee’s braise any better? Let’s just say that when my fork bounced off its surface at the four-hour mark, I had already succumbed to the magic of the inverted foil lid.