Explosives Tenderise Meat Part 2
http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/gmis9838.htm
John B. Long has had a long and interesting career. He's worked as meteorologist, built robots to handle radioactive metals, and built nuclear weapons. And now he has discovered how to use explosives to tenderise meat - in a fraction of a second.It all began in the late 60s, when he was floating in his backyard swimming pool. At that time, he was an explosives expert who designed triggering mechanisms for nuclear bombs. In his experiments, he detonated small chemical explosives underwater. He was worried what would happen if one of these small chemical explosives went off while the technicians were installing them underwater. After all, the human body has roughly the same density as water, so the shock waves would travel quite well through it. And then he started wondering what these shock waves would do to human flesh, or in fact, a piece of steak.
Luckily, some of his friends helped him do an experiment at a privately owned explosives testing site. They got a slab of tough beef, and sliced it in two. One bit of it was going to get the explosives, while the other bit would not. They wrapped one slab of meat in plastic, filled a 50 gallon paperboard drum with water, and dropped the plastic-wrapped beef into the water. Then they put some chemical explosives in the water, retired to a nearby bunker where they could watch the action on a TV monitor, and set the explosives off. He said that the "drum totally disappeared. There was just little pieces of paper fiber all over." Eventually, after 15 minutes of searching, they found the meat on the side of a nearby hill.
John Long then cooked both the shocked and unshocked meats on a BBQ. He said that the unshocked meat was "so tough you could hardly chew it. But the one we shocked - it was delightful, as tender as a $10 steak in those days."
Back then, butchers worked with whole sides of meat. Unfortunately, the bones in the meat would interfere with the shock waves, leaving some zones tender, and others tough. John Long really didn't know what to do with his invention, so he put it aside for 20 years. But in 1988, he started work again on tenderising meat.
Now there actually is a scientific method used to classify meat as tender or tough. You get some cooked meat, and then take out a half inch core, parallel to the muscle fibres. You then rest a sharp guillotine blade on the core. The weight needed for the blade to slice through this core of cooked meat can range between 3 kilograms (very tender) up to 15 kilograms (very leathery). In general, anything that is rated at less than 4.6 kilograms is thought of as tender.
There are many different ways to make the meat more tender - various chilling timetables, hanging the meat for various times at various temperatures, electrical impulses, injecting enzymes into the live animal or sprinkling them onto the carcass after it's dead, or mechanical damage (such as with multiple needles or blades). But these all take lots of time, energy and money.
Long's first detonation chambers were El Cheapo $6 plastic garbage cans. Even though they didn't look very pretty, and were completely destroyed on each Explosive-Tenderisation process, they worked beautifully. He dug a hole in the ground, put the garbage can in the hole, filled it with water, put a 18mm-metal disc on the bottom of the garbage can to act as a shockwave reflector, and added the meat and just a touch of C-4 explosive. They worked out that it took about 1,700 atmospheres of pressure from the explosion to tenderise chicken breasts, but other meats needed half as much.
The shockwave tears the muscle fibres in the meat apart. But the fats and oils which give flavour to meat are relatively unaffected. Another advantage is that the shockwave seems to kill some of the bacteria that can spoil meat.
Long has set up a company called Hydrodyne - "hydro" meaning "water", and "dyne" from the Greek word for "power". He loves shocking meat. He says that "this technology hasn't met a piece of meat it doesn't like."
The garbage bins worked so well that they then decided to go high-tech - an expensive stainless steel drum a metre in diameter, which was inside a frame to absorb the shock. Unfortunately, they didn't get as consistent results as they did with the $6 throw-away plastic garbage bins. They're still working on getting around Murphy's Law.
Each year, some 37 million head of cattle are slaughtered in the USA for the meat market. It takes about two weeks to get this meat to market. This time could be reduced to three or seven days, if they could make the meat more tender in a second, not a week. It takes about $7 million worth of electricity to refrigerate meat in America while it ages.
Another saving would be that the farmers could raise their cattle on cheap grass (which usually gives tough meat) instead of expensive grain (which makes the meat tender).
Another advantage is for the military. In the USA, the military have to buy the cheapest cuts of meat - which are also the toughest. The Army would like to use the shockwave treatment, to make tough meat tender - which is not real surprise, seeing as how the military have, for a very long time, already been using explosives to tenderise meat.
For more infomation: Hydrodyne Meat Tenderizing Process and
http://savell-j.tamu.edu/tenderization.html
Meat Tenderness Lecture: Texas AM University
© Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd 1998.