Food >
Understanding beef grain ∞
- Muscle is long lengths of fiber.
- Imagine a series of straws parallel across your desk.
- Cutting "along the grain" is like separating several whole straws from the group.
- Imagine chewing that bundle of straws.
- It is "chewy" in every direction because your teeth are separating out individual straws and ultimately working hard to slice straws down into smaller pieces.
- Cutting "against the grain" is like slicing the tips off of the ends of your desk of straws.
- Imagine chewing on a row of those straw-tips.
-
It is "tender" because your teeth can easily separate that bundle of tips into pieces.
So the resulting grain length is what determines how tough or tender your cut is.
--
When cutting against the grain and you cut on an angle, you are "cutting on the bias", which makes it even more tender. This is useful when you have a rather unusual/curving grain you are cutting against.
Unless you want to make beef jerky particularly chewy, I don't know of any case where you would want to have long, tough, strands of beef.
--
--
-
How to slice meat against the grain
- by Dumpling Sisters
- Shows cutting against the bias with pork, which has a similar grain appearance to beef since meat is meat.
Last updated 2023-08-10 at 08:20:30
created a section to try to understand this grain thing people keep going on about..