How Can Meat Reach a Safe Cooked Temperature and Still Be Moist?
- Bryan Le
- Mar 24
- 2 min read
One. Fat also serves as a lubricant and has properties that give a mouthfeel of “juiciness”. You can remove quite a bit of water and still retain the subjective texture and experience.
Second. Meat still contains sugars and salts. Salt and phosphates are often added because they are able to retain water, so even as you boil off water, it takes quite a bit of time to remove all of the water. You also have amino acids and proteins with water-retaining properties.
Third. You’re still well below the boiling point of water to cook meat. Proteins usually begin to denature at 65 degrees Celsius, and your goal is really more to kill off microorganisms, which starts occurring at 55 degrees Celsius. That’s why you’re able to sous vide meat - you just need more time at lower temperatures. Rarely is the entire protein mass equally at 100 degrees Celsius - at best, the surface temperature reaches that but not the internal structure.
Pure water has very different properties than water trapped in a complex proteinaceous gel matrix. Even simple gels made of pure starch and water or xanthan gum will behave differently than just a boiling solution of water. There’s still mass transfer effects where vapor needs to transfer out of a molecular matrix, so it’s not quite as straightforward.
For example, the water found in wood doesn’t all immediately vaporize even if the wood is on fire. It takes some time for the vapor to expand out of the cellulosic capillaries and escape the cellular matrix. While not as dramatic or intense, protein matrices and cell structures can retain water in a similar way.
Dr. Bryan Quoc Le is the Founder and Principal Food Consultant of Mendocino Food Consulting. He earned his Ph.D. in Food Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and his B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine. He currently lives in Mendocino, California with his wife and two dogs.
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