Meat loses its juices no less readily when it is placed first in boiling water than in cold water.
BEEF STOCK (ALSO CALLED BROTH OR BOUILLON), chef Jules Gouffé wrote in Le livre de cuisine (1867), is “the soul of ordinary cooking.” Rather than water, which has no taste, cooks have long used wine or the liquid obtained by simmering meats and vegetables in water. This liquid traditionally is served as a first course, but it is used also to moisten various dishes and as an element in the preparation of sauces. How should it be made?
Cookbooks are filled with admonitions. “The gradual heating of the liquid,” states Le livre de cuisine de Mme. E. Saint-Ange (1927), “is of the highest importance for the clarity as well as for the flavorfulness of the broth.” The idea that meat ought to be cooked in water that is initially cold was advanced almost a century earlier by Marie-Antoine Carême, perhaps the most famous of all French cooks, also known as the “cook of emperors” for his service in Russia to the Tsar and in England to the Prince of Wales. Carême proposed an explanation in L’Art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle (1833): “The broth must come to a boil very slowly, otherwise the albumin coagulates, hardens; the water, not having had the necessary time to penetrate the meat, prevents the gelatinous part of the osmazome from detaching itself from it.”
Some ten years before Carême, Brillat-Savarin wrote that “to have a good broth, it is necessary that the water heat slowly, in order that the albumin does not coagulate inside [the meat] before being extracted; and it is necessary that the boiling be scarcely perceptible, so that the various parts that are successively dissolved are able to blend intimately and readily.” The release of the meat’s juices is related, then, to the clarity of the broth.
Are we justified in supposing that the meat yields different quantities of juice depending on whether it is initially placed in hot water or cold water? Plainly everything depends on the length of cooking. Gouffé argued that the cooking must last several hours: “There comes a moment when the meat is cooked and has nothing more to give you in the way of juice or aroma. To let it remain in the pot after it has been completely exhausted by cooking, far from improving the broth, risks spoiling it. I advise a limit of five hours for a large pot-au-feu.”
It is hard to understand why, after five hours of cooking, the smell and taste should still depend on the temperature of the water at the outset. On the other hand, it is easy to see that the mechanical agitation of the broth places in suspension particles that have been separated from the meat, leading to a cloudy broth that will then have to be clarified, at the risk of weakening its flavor.
Since 1995 my colleagues and I have been comparing various cooking methods for broths. It soon became apparent that broths begun with boiling water were cloudier. Nonetheless, the problem of the initial temperature of the water persisted, despite the work of Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), universally known for his pioneering studies in organic chemistry and for his broths and meat extracts.
Liebig claimed that the essential nutrients of meat are found not in its muscle fibers but in its fluids, which are lost during roasting and broth making. When the meat is plunged into boiling water and the temperature then reduced to a simmer, Liebig wrote in an article published in 1848, “the albumin immediately coagulates from the surface [of the meat] inwards, and in this state forms a crust or shell, which no longer permits the external water to penetrate into the interior of the mass of flesh. But the temperature is gradually transmitted to the interior, and there effects the conversion of the raw flesh into the state of boiled or roasted meat. The flesh retains its juiciness, and is quite as agreeable to the taste as it can be made by roasting; for the chief part of the sapid constituents of the mass is retained, under these circumstances, in the flesh.” Conversely, in order to produce a good broth, he recommended against putting the meat in hot water because otherwise the juices would be confined in the meat and one would end up with a tasteless broth.
These precepts formed the basis for a commercial enterprise. Using a vacuum to evaporate the broth produced by cooking minced meat in cold water, Liebig obtained a “beef extract” that he sold throughout the world, simultaneously propagating the theory that broth is best made starting from cold water. Liebig was a good chemist, but on this subject he did no more than copy the writings of Brillat-Savarin, who was neither a scientist nor a cook, a half-century earlier. There is no question that plunging meat into boiling water blanches it immediately. But is this method less effective in extracting the juices?
Lost Juices
Nothing beats an experiment: Let’s cut up a big piece of meat into two equal parts and place half of it in cold water and the other half in boiling water; then let’s heat and periodically weigh the two pieces. We will find that the mass is very rapidly reduced in the boiling water and more slowly in the cold water.
After about an hour of cooking, however, the two pieces have lost the same amount (give or take a gram). After this point the mass no longer varies, even with several additional hours of cooking. Moreover, in a blind tasting the two broths are indistinguishable: Liebig’s broth theory, doubtful in principle, turns out to be false in practice.
However, our experiment suggests a new way of treating the boiled meat once its juices have been released. If it is left to cool sufficiently in the broth, its mass can increase by more than 10% because the meat absorbs the liquid. Why not let the meat cool in a juice made from truffles, for example?