Tough Cuts of Meat Tamed Easily With Jaccards Meat Tenderizer
Written: Jul 07 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Simple and effective
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: This meat tenderizer is well designed and constructed to do its job easily and effectively.
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| gamblin_man's Full Review: Jaccard 16 Blade Meat Tenderizer |
It's no secret I am a meat eater. My favorite way to prepare meat is outdoors with open flames and smoke. One of the benefits of low temperature outdoor cooking in our Traeger grill, for instance, is that we can use tougher cuts of meat. Meat toughness is based on use of the muscle by the living animal. The most used muscles are toughest and have the most flavor. Tough meat is also cheaper to buy. The downside, of course, is that it is harder to cut and to chew. Slow cooking does a lot to break down the connective tissue that, in part, contributes to the toughness of those cheaper cuts. What can really make a difference, though, is poking a lot of holes in the meat. This does several things. It lets the heat penetrate more evenly. It lets those tasty marinades that also help to tenderize the meat into the heart of the usually thick cuts. Often the thickness varies in large cuts of meat like beef brisket. Poking those holes helps even cooking time so all the meat is equally done with little loss of the natural juices that make the meat savory when eaten.
There are many ways to mechanically tenderize meat. Most kitchens have a sort of hammer to pound on thinner cuts, for instance. Commercial companies use large powered devices that can do a lot of meat at a time. Those cube steaks you get at the store are a good example of those tools in use. When you ask your butcher to tenderize a cut of meat for you, he probably has a smaller version in his work area that he uses - at a price usually. We usually buy our meat at a place like Costco or Wal-Mart. We bring it home, thaw it if it is frozen, and tenderize it before we apply the rub or marinade for grilling or smoking. We use the Jaccard 16 Blade Meat Tenderizer and have been using it for a couple of years now.
Jaccard 16 Blade Meat Tenderizer
This is a deceptively simple device for the kitchen. It consists of 16 flat thin blades with sharpened pointed ends connected to a plastic handle well shaped to fit the hand and be held with grease from the meat making the hand slippery. The sharp ends are held in alignment and protected from tenderizing you by another plastic piece that is connected to the handle by two round ABS plastic posts. This mechanism is spring loaded so that when you place it against the surface of the meat and push down, with some force, the blades slide into the meat and make slits. This one makes 16 punctures every time you push. You quickly move it over the surface of the meat in some reasonable pattern until there are many holes all over it. Turn the meat over and do it all again from the other side and the meat is tenderized, ready for that scrumptious marinade. At full depth the blades penetrate about an inch. This device is easy to use and the force needed, even in very tough meat cuts, is not excessive. We can do a ten pound brisket in less than two minutes.
Cleanup isn't too bad. We use the sprayer on our sink to dislodge any meat particles, squirt a little liquid soap in dirty bowl and swish the blade parts through it, then rinse thoroughly and let it air dry. It has a cover that slides over the blade part to keep it clean between uses. The meat tenderizer is dishwasher safe if you want to use the top shelf.
The blades are replaceable as a unit by unscrewing a couple of bolts. We have actually sharpened ours once by holding the sliding part depressed with a clamp and using a small diamond file.
This device is really useful and, we believe, improves the tenderness of the meat, the flavor, and even reduces the shrinkage of some cuts like roast. One would think that all those holes would dry the meat, but that isn't the case. Since we started using this meat tenderizer the meat is more moist and juicy.
Recommended:
Yes
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gamblin_man
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Member: Larry
Location: Pacific Northwest
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