How to Save Cooking Time with Tenderizing

Tenderizing your meat reduces your cooking time and your marinating time.
By reducing your cooking time you will help save energy and participate in saving mother earth :)
You can also use a rolling stone to tenderize your meat.
Tenderizing your meat will make your meal taste better.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• the meat to tenderize
• Vinagre
• the tool of your choise

1. Put the meat between two pieces of wax paper and lay it on top of a cutting board.
   Gve it nice pounding to get it flat. You don't want to pound it too hard like if you were beating it.
   If you are tendering Chicken you are looking for about a 1/4 inch thickness, the meat looks more appetizing when it's skinnier.
   Tendering beef is not as hard as you may think.
   Get you recipe ready and move on to the next step.

2. 
    
   Tenderize your meat using a stone

   Try to avoid chemical meat tenderizers when you can, You can also use a metal or wooden skewer and punch several holes in your steak to make it more tender.
   By punching holes inside the meat you are creating heat tunnels that make your cooking time shorter from 30% to 40%.

3. 
    

   When you tenderize your meat you allow it to shrink less and keep all the flavor.
   Some people will use pineapple to tenderize their meat because pineapple contain "bromelain" which is composed of a number of protease enzymes.
   Papain, is another popular meat tenderizer extracted from the papaya plant.

4. You can also use a regular hammer if you don't have a meat mallet to tenderize your meat. Beating the meat with a hammer or mallet softens the fibers making the meat easier to chew.

5. 
    
   Add vinegar to water

   You could also make your own mix at a very low cost.
   Use 1/2 cup of vinegar with water. Soak the meat for an hour and a half to two hours and a half. After that, rinse your meat then soak it in milk for an hour and a half to two hours and a half.
   Don't forget to email me a piece of your meat so I can try it.

Tips & Warnings

• Did you know that in the past, meat tenderizers were injected directly into living animals, but today this is viewed as both inhumane and unnecessary.
• Bromelain is harvested from pineapple plants.
• If meat tenderizers are allowed to act for too long, the meat can become squishy and lose its special texture.

[Mindee94]

on 11/19/2008 Pineapple is a tenderizer? Learn something new every day. Thanks for the great information. 5* ~Mindee