by Meathead (UF CJC 1967-72)

It’s not every day you encounter a UF alum who’s a barbecue guru, but that’s what happened when Gator Nation News was introduced in June to longtime Chicago resident Meathead, proprietor of AmazingRibs.com and an inductee into the Barbecue Hall of Fame in 2021. (OK, he was Craig Goldman when he was at UF from 1967 to 1972.)

Here, in his first column for Gator Nation News, Meathead sets the record straight on six common meat myths – info that can help you take your tailgates to the next level.

* * *

We all have painful memories of epic barbecue failures. But they are avoidable. Understanding is the first step in mastery, and science helps filter the hogwash, bust the myths and take down the canards passed along by pitmasters whose rituals have gone largely untested since that first forest fire.

With experiments and science, here are a few old husbands’ tales that deserve to die.

MYTH: The red juice is blood.

BUSTED: Meat juices are almost all water that is tinted pink by a meat protein called myoglobin, and myoglobin is never found in the blood stream. If it were blood, the juice would be the same as your blood — dark, almost black — and it would coagulate on the plate. Instead, the juice remains thin and watery.

Every time we call it “blood,” somewhere a bell rings, and a teenager becomes a vegan. Let’s just call it “juice” from now on, OK? And someone please tell those Beyond and Impossible people to stop saying their veggie burgers “bleed” like real meat. Even real meat doesn’t bleed!

MYTH: Let meat come to room temperature first.

BUSTED: A lot of recipes, especially those for big roasts, direct you to take the meat out of the fridge an hour or two before cooking and “let it come up to room temp.”

Here’s how the theory goes: Say you want a steak to be served medium rare, about 130°F. If your fridge is 38°F, then the meat must climb 92°F higher to reach that temperature. But if the meat is room temp, 72°F, then it needs to climb only 58°F. It will cook faster and there will be less overcooked meat just below the surface.

But a 1 1/2-inch steak takes more than two hours for the center to come to room temp! A 4 1/2-pound pork roast that is 3 1/2 inches thick takes — are you ready for this? — 10 hours!

After two hours at room temp in my tests, the meat was only 49°F in the center, and after four or five hours it began to smell funny.

My advice? Just take your meat straight from the fridge to the cooker. It will warm much faster in the cooker than sitting on the kitchen counter. Besides, smoke sticks better to cool meat. It’s a process called “thermophoresis,” and the same phenomenon makes steam stick to your cool mirror when you shower.

It goes without saying that you should never leave poultry, burgers or ground meat at room temp for more than a few minutes. They are susceptible to contamination within the meat, and sitting around can really mess up these meats and your digestive system.

MYTH: Grill marks are the sign of a great steak.

BUSTED: Grocery, restaurant and grill ads show beautiful steaks and burgers with crosshatched grill marks. Some restaurants even buy premarked chicken that they can microwave and serve. Cooking magazines and books teach readers how to get great grill marks. But a great cook doesn’t want them! You want something else.

Browning, also called the Maillard reaction, is a chemical process that happens when proteins and amino acids are exposed to heat. The result is hundreds of new flavorful molecules. The Maillard reaction is highly desirable.

But those grill marks (see photo 1) are merely superficial branding, unlike the deep, rich sear that delivers maximal taste and texture (photo 2). In photo 1, only about one-third of ribeye’s surface is fully browned. The diamond shapes between the grill marks remain tan, full of unrealized flavor potential.

When it comes to meats and many other foods, the goal is to get golden-brown to dark-brown color on as much of the meat’s surface as possible. I’ll admit that some foods do benefit from grill marks. On thin foods like shrimp, skirt steaks and asparagus, grill marking quickly browns the exterior without overcooking the interior. But watch out that your delicious brown stripes don’t turn into burnt, bitter-tasting scars.

MYTH: Searing meat seals in the juices.

BUSTED: This myth has been debunked many times yet can still be found in such improbable locations as the Ruth’s Chris Steak House website: “Our USDA Prime steaks are prepared in a special 1,800°F broiler to seal in the juices and lock in that delicious flavor.”

The first to propagate this idea was the German chemist Justus von Liebig, author of the 1847 book “Researches on the Chemistry of Food.” Liebig hypothesized that, in the words of his 1902 biographer W.A. Shenstone, “in roasting, the escape of the juices should be retarded by heating as strongly as possible at first; the juice then hardens on the outside and protects the surface, which prevents subsequent loss.”

The truth: meat is about 75% water, and most of that is contained in thousands of long, thin muscle fibers. Heating meat always squeezes out juices, and nothing can stop the process. Some juices drip off during cooking and some evaporate.

Although searing browns and firms up the meat’s surface, which makes it taste better, it does not somehow weld the fibers shut and lock in the juices. In fact, the surface gets crusty, mostly because it has dried out due to high heat. As food scientist Harold McGee says in his landmark book, “On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen”: “The crust that forms around the surface of the meat is not waterproof, as any cook has experienced: the continuing sizzle of meat in the pan or oven or on the grill is the sound of moisture continually escaping and vaporizing.”

Food Network personality Alton Brown and J. Kenji López-Alt, of SeriousEats.com, have also conducted experiments showing that steaks and roasts continue to exude juices after searing. Just look at the juices that pool on your cutting board or plate, even when the steak or roast is still whole! Let’s put this myth to bed.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should not sear. Searing produces browning by the Maillard reaction, and brown is beautiful. Brown is delicious!

MYTH: After an hour or two, meats stop taking on smoke.

BUSTED: Meat does not have doors that it shuts as it cooks. There is a lot of smoke moving through the cooking chamber of a smoker, although sometimes it is not very visible. If the surface of the meat is cold or wet, more of the smoke sticks. Usually, late in the cook, the bark gets pretty dry, and when the coals are not producing a lot of smoke, we are fooled into thinking the meat is somehow saturated with smoke.

Throw on a log for smoke and baste the meat to make it moist, and the meat will start taking on smoke again. Just don’t over-baste or aggressively spray because you could wash off some of the smoke that took hours to build up.

In the photo above, the slab of ribs on the left was smoked low and slow for five hours with charcoal and wood chunks. The slab on right was smoked with propane and wood chunks.

MYTH: The fat cap will melt and make the meat juicier.

BUSTED: Nonsense. The fat cap rests between the skin and muscle of animals to keep them warm. It is usually white and fairly hard and can be as much as an inch thick. The late meat scientist and beef consultant Dr. Tony Mata, of Oklahoma State University, explained to me that “Fat will not migrate into the muscle as it is cooked. Fat is mostly oil. Meat is mostly water. Oil and water don’t mix.”

Dr. Greg Blonder of Boston University, science advisor to AmazingRibs.com, adds: “as the meat cooks, water-based juices are being pushed from the interior to the surface. No way fat can swim upstream.”

The truth is that the fat cap melts when it softens during cooking. Some melted fat lightly coats exposed muscles groups, and much of it drips onto the fire, where it vaporizes and settles back on the meat, adding flavor. So, there is some benefit to surface fat.

The potential danger of leaving a thick layer of fat on the outside of steaks and chops is it can drip so heavily onto the fire that it flares up and deposits soot on the meat. A large amount of constantly dripping fat might even incinerate your entire meal.

What’s worse: most people will trim off the fat at the dinner table, along with your carefully crafted spice rub. And there goes all the flavor you lovingly rubbed onto the fat.

Disclaimer: The opinions in this column are those of Meathead and do not necessarily represent those of the University of Florida.