Sage culinary wisdom, and a bit that everyone who is serious about cooking should print, and put into the front of their recipe book.
Deeger wrote:
Everybody has already said to go low and slow but it wasn't until about a year ago that I learned why you want to go low and slow. Maybe this will help you, too.
Ribs are from a load-bearing area of the cow and the meat is high in connective tissue made from collagen protein, which is tough and stringy. However, collagen starts to melt around 140-150 degrees and if you can melt most (or all) of it then the meat turns out tender and flavorful. It can take a while, though, which is why everybody suggested cooking it for 8+ hours. One hour isn't enough.
The muscle proteins are the opposite. They start out tender but once they start going over ~155 degrees they begin to contract and squeeze out the water in the meat, leaving it dry and tough. This is why even an expensive fillet (which has very little collagen) is chewy when it's cooked well-done.
The ribs were inedible because it was a double whammy of lots of collagen coupled with dried-out muscle. The sweet spot for beef is between 135 and 145 degrees. If you can cook it long enough even the cheapest cut of beef comes out tender and tasty. I've been using a home-made sous vide cooker for the last year and it makes cooking meat almost fool-proof (almost--one time I set it up wrong and boiled the meat for 24 hours. Even your dogs wouldn't have eaten it.) I cooked a chuck roast for 48 hours at 131 degrees that came out really good and you could cut it with a fork. Even better is that you get to look manly by finishing the steaks off with a blow torch. Well, maybe you don't care to look more manly but I need all the help I can get. I still haven't cooked really good BBQ ribs with it, though--nothing replaces a good smoker.
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Quote:
19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Ezekiel 23:19-20
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