Does Searing Meat "Seal In" Juices? - Part 2

<< Continued from Page 1

The most common objections to The Claim (or the theory that searing meat helps to "seal in" juices) seem to focus on the word sealing, which the theory's opponents, the "debunkers," gleefully seize upon as proof that The Claim is bogus.

They hear the word "sealing" and suddenly turn into Perry Mason: "Aha!" they cry, as if they've just caught you in some narrow, linguistic trap they'd been carefully and painstakingly devising. It's like telling someone, "I just flew in from the coast last night," and having them they jump up and shout: "But you didn't fly at all! The plane flew. You just sat there." The debunkers don't ever seem to tire of playing this game.

Typical Objections

Predictably, the main thrust of the debunkers' objection to claims of "sealing" is that anything short of being literally waterproof fails to meet the standard. At best, it's an argument indicative of someone who isn't even trying to be reasonable. They're just arguing with you for the fun of it. We're not talking about encasing the meat in Lucite. We're cooking it, not making paperweights out of it.

In fact, we'll gladly stipulate that cooking meat leads to moisture loss. No question about it. But The Claim has nothing to do with creating waterproof meat. All it says is that searing meat — cooking it quickly over high-heat with a little bit of fat — helps to prevent moisture loss. It "seals in," or "prevents the loss of," moisture. No, not totally — just more than cooking it any other way.

And that's the only relevant measurement anyway: whether searing results in a juicier steak than any other method of cooking. Otherwise, someone could claim that not cooking meat at all "seals in juices," a statement that clearly does not make a useful contribution to a discussion on cooking methods.

Is it Time for the "Science" Yet?

So far, The Claim is still alive and well. Meanwhile, the debunkers have absolutely been dying to talk about science. It's their trump card — or at least they think it is. And we've probably made them wait long enough, so let's do it. What about all that "science?"

As it turns out, there's not much real science the debunkers can turn to for help. The best they've come up with is some version of the following "experiment:"

1. Begin with two similar steaks. Call them Steak "A" and Steak "B."
2. Weigh each one and make a note of its weight.
3. Sear Steak "A" only.
4. Now place both in an oven and cook each one until its internal temperature reaches some predetermined level — 135°F, let's say.
5. Weigh each steak again.
6. Determine how much less each one weighs now compared with before cooking, and express the difference as a percentage of its original weight.

We're then asked to imagine (which is, after all, so much easier than actually conducting the experiment, what with the hassle of having to do it over and over again, under laboratory conditions and all) that the seared steak has lost a greater percentage of its original weight than the unseared one.

They pause expectantly, perhaps waiting for you to collapse at their feet from the sheer force of their relentless science.

So Much for the "Science"

Instead, the only thing collapsing is the experiment itself. By assuming that water loss is the only reason a steak might weigh less after it's cooked, the exercise exits the world of science and veers into the realm of nonsense. We're not told why we should accept this assumption. We're not even told that it is an assumption. Maybe we weren't supposed to notice.

But since the experiment's conclusions are based solely on weight, wouldn't it be reasonable to ask if cooking might cause a steak to lose something besides water? Like fat, maybe? Unfortunately, the experiment doesn't take the fat variable into account.

That's quite a significant error, because fat is a lot less dense than muscle. Therefore, a pair of uncooked steaks might weigh exactly the same, yet have different fat-to-muscle ratios. When cooked, the fattier one might lose more weight than the leaner one — even if they're both cooked the same way. In other words, the different post-cooking weights might be more a function of fat content than water content. But without controlling for the fat variable, we'll never know.

By positing a model in which fat doesn't exist, only protein and water, the experiment proves nothing at all — at least not to anyone in the reality-based community. Ultimately, by failing to meet even the most minimal standards of experimental validity, it's the experiment itself that ends up being debunked. Read Part 3 of the article >>