People who don’t like rare steak often say that they don’t like it because of the bloodiness. However, it recently turned out that the red liquid isn’t blood at all.
The presence of the red liquid in rare steak isn’t blood. All of the blood is removed from the meat during the processing, long before the meat is served on your plate.
The rarest and reddest of steak is free of blood. Let’s find out what the red liquid is!
Red Liquid in Steak: It’s Not Blood
Even the rarest and reddest of steaks are free of blood. Rather, this liquid is a combo of water, which is around 75 percent of meat, and a protein present in muscle tissue known as myoglobin.
If this name sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it reminds you a bit of hemoglobin, a protein responsible for the transportation of oxygen in blood. But, myoglobin isn’t blood: its role is to transport oxygen through muscles.
Myoglobin may remind you of blood on your plate since, like it happens in hemoglobin, the iron in myoglobin turns red when it’s exposed to oxygen. So, the muscle tissue is red. Most mammals have lots of myoglobin in their tissue.
This is why meat from mammals like beef, pork, and lamb or what we commonly refer to as red meat.
This meat comes from animals with low levels of myoglobin like poultry or no myoglobin at all like some sea life or white meat. The younger the age of the animal, the less muscle tissue and therefore the less myoglobin it has.
The opposite is the case with older animals. Cows are usually harvested at an older age than pigs, for example, this is why the liquid from steak is darker red and people think it’s blood, unlike the liquid that leaks from pork.
Myoglobin may lose the red color because of chemical changes as time goes by. This is why the meat that has been standing on shelves in supermarkets or has rested in the fridge for several days turns brown.
But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the meat has gone bad; however, it’s good to use the sniff test instead of the eye test. Some types of meat like hot dogs are misleading as they’re treated with nitric oxide that helps them keep their pink-red color regardless.
When you need to cook the steak, the myoglobin will become darker because of the exposure to heat and it will reduce in moisture. This is why rare steaks look bloodier whereas well-done steaks are grayer.
How to Cook a Tasty & Juicy Steak?
When you cook steak, leave it to stand for around five minutes. This will allow the juices that are pushed towards the center of the cut under the heat to redistribute and reabsorb in the steak.
If you follow this practice, the steak will lose less liquid when it’s cut and you’ll have less “blood” on the plate.
If you’ve been cooking steaks well done and you’ve been avoiding rare steak due to the presence of “blood”, you’ve been missing out on some amazingly tender and juicy meat without a reasonable cause.
And, the next time you find yourself in a restaurant, order that rare steak and enjoy!
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