Attack of the Bromelain
I’m sure many of you have already come across this method of using Pineapple to tenderize meat but it makes me chuckle when I remember all of those videos of people experimenting with Coke and steak to prove how bad coke was for you because it broke down meat over time? Well, healthy, all natural, and yes, even organically marketed Pineapple does it better and quicker. This is thanks to the enzymes in Pineapple that sound much scarier when we call them by them their unnatural, sciency name, Bromelain instead of the much friendlier, less frightening, “Stuff in Pineapples”.
Well, I decided to give this a try. My initial intent was to buy a super cheap cut of beef just to see how well the Pineapple could break it down but Wegmans had a salse so I got a slightly better cut for what I wanted to pay for a not so good one. In retrospect, I should have just gotten a huge Sirloin but I got an adequate Strip Steak. I also thought that maybe I’d do the whole “Put Pineapple on one piece, Salt a second, cook a third one unseasoned, and leave a fourth and final piece covered in Pineapple for 2 days like the Coke experiments just to see how broken down those proteins would get. Hunger, laziness, and the idea of wasting food got the better of my senses and I just decided to cook the whole thing with Pineapple. There are plenty of comparisons to google and see someone elses results.
I followed everyone’s advice and didn’t let it sit for more than one hour. As it was it was with just an hour with the Pineapple Puree on, it got a bit difficult to flip on the indoor grill as the sides broke away while using tongs. This proved to me that the Bromelain had done its job.
My only complaint was a bit of a mistake of my own. After washing off the Puree, patting the steak dry, and rubbing in a bit of Spanish Rosemary Sea Salt, I threw the steak on the grill with the meat thermometer in… but it was set to the last temp I cook with it, which was for pork. By the time I realised it was set at 140F for Pork, it was already past the 125F for medium rare and I wanted RARE rare.
All in all it was still really excellent, and perhaps the extra cooking tested the mettle of the tenderizing technique more anyway. It was a bit of work for a single meal and a single set of leftovers but I got to try a new way of prepping meat and got to use my new smokeless indoor grill and steak knives.
If you’re interested, I also cooked the Fingerlings a little differently. This is the first time I boiled them before pan cooking them (in bacon grease collected from breakfast) and they turned out way better that I’ve had luck with before. Oh, also, I used The Salt Experiment’s Spanish Rosemary Sea Salt on both the Steak and Potatoes.
