Why does meat get tougher after cooking, but tender after cooking for a very long time (or under pressure)?
In: Biology
**Toughness:** Proteins are made up of folded amino acids. When heated, their bonds break apart and they assume a new shape. This is why an egg white goes from clear to white when heated.
**Tenderness:** Heating up the connective tissue inside the muscle causes it to liquify which is what tenderness is. If you heat for a long time at lower heat, you do a lot melting and preserve moisture. Pressure cooking adds more energy while also keeping moisture inside.
It generally has to do with what temperature the meat is cooked.
When you cook something for a short time at a high temperature, you dry it out much quicker which causes the meat to tighten/shrivel up.
But when you cook something at a low temperature for a long time, the water in the meat doesn’t dry out as quickly, (or under high pressure, where the pressure helps to keep the water from boiling away) instead the connective tissue in the meat starts to break down from the heat, while still staying moist, which gives you that meat that falls apart/off the bone.
Not sure this is 100 percent correct, but my mom is a chef and said cooking a meat quickly with high temperature causes the moisture inside to evaporate which toughens the meat, but if done gradually ( depends on the meat ) with a correct temperature allows most of the moisture to stay, pressure cookers don’t allow the moisture to evaporate either I think.
What kind of meat are you talking about? A beef tenderloin will be tender as hell if you cook it proper in minutes and a chuck roast will be tender after 6 hours. Pork vs chicken? Veal? Venison? It is completely different for everything. You gotta be more specific.
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