Pauly sent me another page full of words for this blog today. That’s number three. I thought I owed it to him to make it an official segment and give it a name (or something that resembles a name for now)

Pauly, the soap box is yours…

Cooking meat…

It happened again today…I received a text from a good friend wanting food advice, this in itself is great news but it was the same boring question I get asked all the time…”how long and at what temperature do I roast this piece of meat” basically FUCK off and die!!! Ok that may be a tad to harsh so I will clarify a few things about cooking meat now on this public forum so that everyone can go on about there meat cooking business.

I’m going to go about this in point form for a few reasons

1. I find it easier for you to understand
2. It looks good
3. And basically I struggle with the English language

So here we go with how to ROAST MEAT…

• There is actually a gauge/formula that can be used and it goes like this…. 220c for 30 minutes then turn oven down to 160c and cook for a further 30 minutes per kg of meat…then rest for 25 minutes before slicing
• That method does work and will cook meat to medium…so if you wanted it to be rarer then guess what? You cook it less…. rocket surgery!!!
• But my point is… if at all I ever had one, pretty sure I’ve had one in my head all along and only now sharing it with you…is that as chef’s we don’t use this formula in fact I reckon most chef’s wouldn’t even know it, what do we do? You ask…
• Well we seal the meat off either in a pan or on a hot plate and transfer into a roasting pan with some form of trivet, a trivet is simply something that keeps the meat from the bottom of the pan (it could be large chunks of onions, carrots, potatoes or even a wire rack), then we place it in a hot oven, yes hot is an exact temp in the chef world….then this is where it gets crazy….are you ready for it….we cook it till its COOKED!!!!
• We don’t know how long we guess a time where we reckon it won’t be cooked then we check every 20 minutes until it is cooked, and then we rest it for 1/5 of the cooking time.
• We check if its cooked by pressing the meat feeling for firmness, by looking at the colour of juices coming out of the meat, and a trick I use is stick a knife or metal skewer in the center of the meat for 3 seconds then take it out and place on your lip…if its hot then its cooked!!
• Resting is when you leave the meat in a warm spot to allow the juices to stop freaking out and relax so when you cut the meat they don’t sod off and leave you with tough dry meat…

I really do have a point to all this and it is definitely not to show what a bunch of cowboys us chef’s are… its to make you all realize that you have to start to feel, smell and listen to your food*. It doesn’t help anyone if I tell you how long to cook something for, because there are always going to be variables and you need to learn cooking skills not how to follow a recipe, but instead you should all be learning how to create a recipe.

That concludes my rant for today I hope you got something out of it…if you didn’t then your level of stupidness is beyond me.

*if you havn’t already, check previous post ‘your face… an essential item when cooking food’