The Complete Handbook of Meat

Chapter 1: Understanding Meat

What You Are Actually Buying

When you buy a piece of meat, you are not buying a uniform block of protein. You are buying a cross-section of a muscle, plus the fat, connective tissue, and bone that came with it. That cross-section is the result of a specific animal, a specific breed or crossbreed, a specific diet, a specific level of activity, and a specific set of post-mortem handling decisions. All of those factors are legible in the raw product, if you know what to look for. The skills in this chapter are the ones that let you look at a loin or a shoulder or a leg and predict, with good accuracy, how it will behave in a pan, an oven, a smoker, or a slicer.

The first thing to internalize is that meat is not a single substance. It is a composite of three main materials: muscle fibers, connective tissue, and adipose tissue (fat). Each one plays a different role in the eating experience. Muscle fibers are long, thin cells that contract to move the animal. They are organized into bundles, and the bundles are wrapped in connective tissue. The thickness of those bundles, the length of the fibers, and the amount of connective tissue between them vary enormously from one muscle to the next. A pork tenderloin and a pork shoulder come from the same animal, but they are so different in structure that you might as well be buying two different products—and