Hunt It. Gather It. Work It.: Oh no! Steamed Meat?

The Low Down

The human body is a metabolic marvel comprised of dozens of little systems connecting to create one complex system. Food is the fuel, the input, for the systems. Our metabolic machinery evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to function optimally on select fuels. These fuels were the original, Primal foods of the human organism. Over these hundreds of thousands of years our Big Game Hunting, small prey capturing, scavenging, foraging, gathering, opportunistic ancestors accumulated experience and wisdom about nourishing themselves. The learned to preserve and predigest foods to maximize the quality of their metabolic fuel. Eventually they learned to cook foods without destroying the important nourishing properties of the food, and then they learned to heal the human body with food. Only recently in the human evolutionary experience, have we abandoned all these hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated epicurean genius. Now we fuel our marvelous, complex metabolic machinery with crap invented to create profits for agribusiness. We have become dumb eaters. As we regain our eating intelligence it doesn't make sense to move back to the savannah and put out our fires or climb into our cave and pretend there is a glacier next door. It makes sense to fuel our bodies with all the primal human foodstuffs, prepared and preserved with accumulated ancestral wisdom and served up for the undeniable desires of the human taste buds. Primal, paleolithic food choices, handled according to ancient food ways resulting in outrageously good food.

PRIMAL. SMART. DELECTABLE.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Oh no! Steamed Meat?

Getting ready to roast my Thanksgiving turkey involved the usual scanning of magazines and cookbooks for anything inspirational. In my mind I was anticipating finding something like a new herb butter rub or gravy addition. For some reason I got out my grandmother's original Joy of Cooking to read about roasting a turkey. And there I found myself accused of steaming my turkey instead of roasting it! It said that the modern cook now often covers the bird with tin foil thinking to prevent it from drying out, but that the tin foil actually results in the turkey being steamed due to trapped moisture rather than a true roasting process. No way in hell was I steaming my turkey (even though I've always been very pleased with my turkeys). The solution? Take a cloth, soak it in butter, and lay it over the turkey during cooking. I am always keen on the idea of plenty of butter, but a cloth soaked in it? Was I gonna burn the house down or ruin the turkey? Who knew, but no tin foil was going to be in my oven, so I tried it. I used an old fashioned, very thin, linen dish towel soaked in melted butter. Every 25min I basted the turkey right over the cloth so it stayed moist. I did have to add a little more stock than I would have to my steamed bird, but it went swimmingly and was delicious. The skin was actually the very best turkey skin I have ever tasted. Perfect texture. Every year from now on this will be my method. Tin foil-another example of how "modern" cookery has stolen from us!