Could there be anything better than returning home to the smell of a rich and delicious shin beef casserole that has been slow cooking on the AGA into a gelatinous, rich, and sticky treat?
Yes.
Slowly cooking a brisket over an open fire on a camping holiday and serving it with pickled vegetables then eating it while watching the sun go down.
Slow cooking is not just for wintertime, it is a great way to include a range of important nutrients in our diets at any time in the year.
In our modern culture, we have on the whole left behind the culinary culture of slow-cooking meat – especially on the bone – and instead prefer to go for the easy and quick and lean meat such as steaks, chicken breasts, pork and lamb chops, and other pan-frying or grilling-friendly options – especially in summer.
This quick-cooking fits in with our fast lifestyles; many people don’t have a range cooker in their homes or a ‘wife’ at every stove. The ‘eat lean meat’ anti-fat propaganda runs deep too; many people opt for visibly ‘pretty’ and ‘clean’ cuts of meat because they consider them more healthy.
With this change of culture, we’ve lost the slow cooking skills which means we’re missing out on some of the most mouth-wateringly flavoursome parts of the animals available and missing out on incredibly important nutrients too.
Many of us who turn to eating an ancestral diet simply eat more and more meat. Not only does this raise many legitimate sustainability issues, it turns out that it’s actually really important to eat the full range of animal parts and not just the clean lean bits. This makes complete sense. Our genes have been moulded by our behaviours, and for hundreds of thousands of years we would have eaten the whole animal; our health depends on us continuing to honour our ‘hard wiring.’
In a diet that has a lot of ‘clean’, lean meat, a person will be ingesting large amounts of the amino acid methionine. It has been shown in studies that a diet high in methionine could cause a rise in plasma homocysteine. Homocysteine is used as an index of our susceptibility to disease. The great news is that if we eat enough glycine – found in offal, skin, and connective tissue – and get the ratios in better balance, this risk is negated.1
According to Catherine Shanahan, MD, quick cooked and overcooked muscle meat becomes ‘tough because the fat, protein, and sugar molecules have gotten tangled and fused together during a wild, heat-crazed chemical orgy. The result is a kind of tissue polymer that requires more work with a knife and more chewing as well as more time to digest. The worst part is so many of the nutrients are ruined.
In Denise Mingers’ wonderful and funny talk at the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2012, she explains that other cultures celebrate the ‘weird bits’ as the best cuts of the animal, using them for feasts and special occasions.3
When we fry or grill muscle meat and especially when we BBQ meat in summer it tends to char and burn – we like the ‘browned’ effect; it’s tasty. This process causes amino acids like creatine to react and form harmful compounds called heterocyclic amines (HAs). If the juices are allowed to drip and cause the flames to flare around the meat this creates another harmful compound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs can result in DNA mutations after being metabolised by specific enzymes; when fed to animals these compounds have been shown to cause a range of cancers. This is very hard to study in people but is likely to translate to humans to some degree.4
When meat is cooked at lower temperatures, instead of a tangled mess of hard-to-digest amino acids, the long protein chains stay in orderly lines. The moisture in the meat allows the peptide bonds to be neatly ‘clipped’ into small peptide segments; this process is called hydrolytic cleavage. In a fantastic quirk of nature; these peptide segments fit neatly into our taste buds receptors, which are also tiny, and the food is perceived as ‘tastier’.
In fatty cuts of meat with connective tissue and skin, the water – maintained within slow cooking methods – gently teases out the family of molecules called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). GAGs are long molecules but the slow cooking process reduces them into delicious ‘taste bud-sized’ sugars that taste great. Slow cooking makes meat taste better and also happens to be good for you!The GAGs you may be familiar with are glucosamine, chondroitin sulphate, and hyaluronic acid. These GAGs have become well established in helping with arthritic pain and improving joint health, but it’s important to realise when we are shelling out for these supplements that it’s the natural source of these (the collagen that turns into gelatine after cooking) that has been shown in studies to be most effective in combating joint issues – the supplements in isolation seem to be missing something. This is yet another example of where nature is ten steps ahead of science.5
Our grandparents often ate the cheaper cuts such as neck, shin, knuckles, head, shanks, and trotters from traditional breeds of animals reared on rich grasslands. These slow cooking recipes and techniques are part of our heritage for very good reasons – they really do taste great and are completely essential for our good health.
There are four significant amino acids found in collagen-rich slow cooking cuts: proline, glycine, glutamine, and alanine. These all have an important part to play in our health, but glutamine, especially when cooked with salt for a long time, produces a flavour now generally called ‘umami’, the fifth flavour. This umami flavour is what top chefs try to incorporate into dishes to send their diners’ taste buds into an orgasmic state. Umami has been used throughout history in traditional cooking; in some ancient healing systems such as Ayurveda the inclusion of a range of flavours is suggested as a way of ensuring you are getting the nutrients our bodies need.6
Lamb, hogget and mutton shoulder on the bone can make a delicious meal at any time of the year.
I think we will continue to learn that our bodies have the inherent ability to ‘taste’ what we should and shouldn’t eat for both improving our health and protecting us from danger. The problem we have as humans living in a modern world is that science has produced foods – artificial flavourings, for example – that ‘trick’ our taste buds and override this innate talent; essentially making healthy foods seem less flavoursome by comparison. We have sadly allowed our food growers to reduce our ‘range’ of foods and breeds of animals and plants down to commercial varieties bred for size, efficiency, and profitability instead of flavour and nutrition. This is one of the reasons your food is cheap, but at what cost?
Our grandparents often ate the cheaper cuts such as the neck, shin, knuckles, head, shanks, and trotters from traditional breeds of animals reared on rich grasslands. These slow cooking recipes and techniques are part of our heritage for very good reasons – they really do taste great and are completely essential for our good health.
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Excellent article, whereas our forefathers would not understand the chemistry of this, they did know what was good for them.
I love my BBQ, but also look forward to the winter for the slow cooked stews.
I have a question,what is the best temperature for slow cooking, in my research I’ve it varies from 85c to 150c, the lower temperature is quoted by Raymond Blanc, he says higher than 85 will murder the meat, who can argue with him?