I would think there would always be some blood cells left in the nooks and crannies?
It would be nearly impossible to eliminate every last cell. Would there be any reason to want to?
The OP seems to be a reference to a Jewish procedure, in which which Kosher meat must be cleansed of its blood in order to be ritually fit to eat. I’m looking up some references for y’all…
Is there a little bit of blood left? Yes. But the vast majority of juices that remain in the meat are not blood.
A short version of the process can be found about 1/3 of the way down on this site, and a much more detailed (perhaps too detailed) description is here.
So, even koshered meat really still contains some blood, and I would wager it is quite a bit. Doesn’t this rob red meat of it’s iron? Are people who keep Kosher, especially women, well advised to take iron supplements or take care to obtain iron from another dietary source? If I grill a steak that is from koshered meat will it be juicy? Will there be that lovely broth that runs out of the meat and that I mix with the steak sauce?
Yeah, I have a lot of questions, and I am not even from New Jersey.
There is very little blood in any well-prepared cut of beef. The iron in red meat comes from the myoglobin in the meat. This is also what gives red meat its color. The myoglobin turns red when exposed to oxygen, which is why the outside of raw meat is often red while the inside is gray. Carbon monoxide can also turn meat pink, and some meat packers use this to make the raw meat look more attractive in the package. No, it is not harmful to your health.
The juiciness of a steak depends on how marbled it is and how it has been cooked. Almost all of the juice that comes from a steak is internal cellular fluids, mostly water, that comes from cells which have been damaged by cooking and freezing. A never-frozen raw steak will not leak until it is cooked, because few of the cells have been damaged. Frozen meat will drip a little more pre-cooking, because freezing destroys some cell membranes. Even though the liquid in the package might be red colored, it isn’t blood. It’s more similar to plasma than anything else.
So basically, kosher meat is almost identical to regular meat. There will be very little quality difference due to the kosher process – most of the quality comes from the quality of the cut and grade of the meat itself. Claims that kosher meat tastes better spring from price difference expectations and confirmation bias.
Take a look at the juices that come out of meat sometime. They are transparent, watery pink, thin fluids. Bovine blood looks like your own – thick, deep red, and opaque.
Just to clarify. The marbled parts are veins of fat. A lot of the fat cells break when cooking, releasing the “juices” which flavor the meat and keep it from drying up.
Kosher meat can be quite delicious, mostly because it is usually of a pretty high quality. It does not, however, taste inherently better than a non-kosher steak of comparable quality.
Thanks, ivn1188, I didn’t know how to answer the iron question. OTOH, kosher meat does have higher levels of salt because of this process. People who keep kosher and are on low-sodium diets are often advised to give the meat a few extra rinses before cooking to help lower the salt.
Back to the OP, the koshering process requires the meat to be covered with a layer of salt According to one book I have, “The salt need not be heaped up like snow; it will suffice if it has the appearance of frost on a rooftop.” Given that this applies regardless of the size of the piece of meat, it seems clear to me that there can easily be large pieces where that much salt is not enough to extract the blood from within.
Now I’m curious – is the meat Koshered while still part of the carcass, or only once its been cut into its final form? For example, is a side of beef koshered, the tenderloin itself, or the individual filets cut from the tenderloin?
My understanding is that one can kosher an entire side of beef at once, after the innards and other stuff have been removed. Not sure if that counts as a “carcass”. OTOH, one does have to insure that the entire surface has been covered, and that can be tricky depending on the shape. It certainly does not need to be as small as an individual fillet.
Remember that blood in cows isn’t laying there all willy nilly. It’s inside veins and arteries and capillaries and stuff. It’s all a connected set of tubes, although some of them do get very tiny indeed. That translucent “juice” isn’t blood at all, it’s interstitial fluid - the fluid that sits between the cells - and intracellular fluid, the fluid from within the cells that leaks out when you cut through the cell walls.
Only about 6% (1/5 of the 1/3 that’s extracellular) of the water in human bodies is in the blood, and I expect cows are much the same. Lots of juicy stuff that isn’t blood.