Long, Low and Slow
Like most men, I have some difficulty admitting when I've been wr... wro.... well, other than entirely correct, but sometimes the weight of evidence or some great crashing wave in the zeitgeist just moves the goalposts and you find yourself truly, deeply, irretrievably wrong - there, I said it. Such has been the case with my attitude to cooking meat.
I learned to cook through the eighties and nineties. Great things were happening in the world of food, particularly in the UK. We were turning our collective backs on the overcooked, the stewed, the heavily sauced and the 'international cuisine' our post war parents had enjoyed.
We sniggered at our mothers and grandmothers with their roasting tins, their basting spoons and their barding needles. We smirked about their big, grey 'overcooked' roasts, nurtured in the uterine warmth of the slow oven. We flung it all aside in favour of seared meat.
With a swashbuckling yuppie elan we scorned the cheaper cuts. The finest, most tender meat our new wealth could acquire was 'sealed' in pans as overheated as the market. With vampire zeal we fed and the juices of near raw meat ran down glossy chins.
And ever since, we've been perfecting this technique. Looking at the supermarket meat section these days you'd imagine that animals were made of steak. Where once, scrag, neck, chump and shin would have occupied valuable retail space there is nothing but glistening slabs of pure, tender muscle. Once favoured cuts like legs or shoulders are brutally 'butterflied' or boned and rolled so they can be flash grilled. Do cows have bones any more? Are sheep composed only of tenderloin, remaining erect in the field by virtue of permanent clenching. Do pigs exist at all?
The same principle holds throughout - buy meat good enough to eat raw and burn the outside.
But in recent years - really quite suddenly in the tectonically slow moving world of food - there has been a real change.
For me the epiphany was Paula Wolfert's magnificent book 'The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen'(2003) and more specifically a single recipe for slow cooked leg of lamb. Though she correctly credits Harold McGee and to a lesser extent Heston Blumenthal with rediscovering the idea, they merely provide the scientific rigour behind a kitchen truth as old as cooking.
It doesn't require much. A little water in the roasting tin, a temperature around 100 and anything from 6 to 24 hrs. Really showoff recipes drop the temperature even further, though writers often feel the need to recommend a scalding in boiling water as a kick off, to kill off anything living on the surface before cooking.
The basic principle is this. If you want the centre of your meat to reach a certain temperature - let's say 65 degrees for rare lamb - there are two ways to approach cooking. One can either use a substantially hotter oven and expect the outside to cook faster than the inside or one can set the oven only a little higher than the eventual temperature required and allow a considerable period for the meat to cook.
Either method will work - to the extent that the meat will be properly cooked through, but the first method will yield a classic crisp browned outside and rare centre while the second method seems to result in something altogether more homogenous. A consistently perfect texture all the way through.
McGee's other great gift to the cooks of the world has been to debunk the myth of 'sealing in the juices' by searing. High temperature cooking, even when a suitable resting period is allowed, still results in the loss of juices and fats. The most exciting part of Wolfert's technique is the way that the fats throughout a more challenging cut of meat can be raised to such a temperature that they seem to combine with the body of the meat. Like a good, old-fashioned kleftiko, the fibres of meat in Wolfert's lamb leg are 'confitted' in their own fats.
Eating slow cooked meat for the first time you realise why sauces were invented. A pan-seared piece of meat cries out for liquid accompaniment - usually fat-based and highly flavoured - to make it digestible. Slow cooked meat is perfused with flavour and fats. It requires nothing.
For someone to whom meat is religion, epiphany is not too strong a word for the effect that Wolfert's recipe has had on me.
Though I still look at the colour of meat, worry about its hanging time and occasionally enjoy a crisply seared filet - I'm now far more interested in complex cuts with challenging mixtures of muscle fibre, fat, cartilage and connective tissue.
I'm bored by the garnet hues of perfectly marbled Wagyu. Any idiot can slap that on a grill, I'm looking for something as complicated as a footballer's knee that can be coaxed, with time and gentle heat into a rich, self-saucing meat jam.
Shins, shoulders, pork bellies and whole ducks, anything shot through with enough fat gets the slow treatment and, though my life may be shortened, its quality has risen.
And now, suddenly, everybody is doing it. Every half-baked media hash-slinger is rediscovering their inner Mum and bringing out perilously low and slow cooked cheap cuts. 12 hour lamb leg, 24 hr pork belly, it's only a matter of time before some food channel nonentity comes up with slow roast ox-skull - cooked for two months on the pilot light - that cuts with a spoon and tastes like heaven.
It galls me to say it but our mothers may have been right. Though there's nothing quite as disheartening as an overcooked roast there can be nothing as satisfying as a properly slow-cooked joint.