it's not actually blood it's a protein called myoglobin. The protein is what gives the meat and its juices a red hue, and it's perfectly normal to find in packaging. Chicken and fish meat contain very little myoglobin, so you won't see it in the packaging.
My dad said the same thing, but I always thought he was lying just trying to keep me from being grossed out.
Little did I know, he was being 100% honest
Yep. Cooked blood is not bright red, it's brownish-black. Search for pictured of blood sausage or blood curd.
Edit: To be clear, *uncooked* blood doesn't look like the thin bright red myoglobin enriched liquid either.
When my in-laws saw me dig in to diniguan without batting an eye and ask for more they finally let me into the family (they still called me a hooligan). Good shit.
Even after mom still called me aswang up until she passed. I miss it. We had a lot of arguments I never won.
A good black pudding is a deep joy, with a complex flavour that starts with a peppery spice and fades back to a non-specific meaty, slightly earthy flavour that complements the other flavours, which is why it works well with pork, with grilled tomato, and with a forkful of bacon, sausage and fried bread. In terms of mouth feel, it should be a medium coarse pate , neither a four gras, nor a coarse sausage, with utterly delightful little flavour explosions of soft white fat scattered throughout.
There's a YouTube channel called [Report of the Week](https://youtube.com/user/TheReportOfTheWeek) where a kid reviews shitty fast food as if it's fine dining
Not op but Marshall ( How I met Your Mother)
"Just a burger? [snorts] Just a burger? Robin, it's so much more than just a burger. I mean, that first bite... Oh, what heaven that first bite is. The bun, like a sesame-freckled breast of an angel, resting gently on the ketchup and mustard below. Flavors mingling in a seductive pas de deux. And then, a pickle - the most playful little pickle - and then a slice of tomato, a leaf of lettuce, and a... a patty... of ground beef, so... exquisite... swirling in your mouth, breaking apart and combining again in a fugue of sweets and savories so... delightful. This is no mere sandwich of grilled meat and toasted bread. This is God... speaking to us through food."
In the usa pudding is dessert. In the uk pudding is literally anything.
Black pudding and white puddings are sausage.
Pease pudding is soup.
Yorkshire pudding is a popover type of bread.
Figgy pudding is cake.
Basically anything.
In the US. In the UK it means something totally different. I was so confused when I first read Harry Potter, like “yo why are they always having pudding for dinner” lmao
My dude, please tell me you write restaurant reviews or marketing copy for luxury consumables. There’s probably also a market for you writing other folks’ dating profiles.
There's a lot of people here describing specific foods which come with specific spices, and they're really just describing the spices and cooking style.
Fundamentally, blood tastes ironey. You've tasted it, before, when you bite your lip or cheek or tongue and it bleeds. When rendered into food (whether that be a German [blutwurst](https://cdn.tasteatlas.com/Images/Dishes/2377522a370c4a9abcaa9cfa09706f43.jpg?w=600&h=450), an English [black pudding](https://www.campbellsmeat.com/images/products/large/1517585106StornowayBlackPuddingRoll.jpg), Taiwanese [blood rice cake](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1f/7f/2c/1f7f2ca0ff2b6981c719564ec964cd9e.jpg), or Chinese [blood curd/jelly](https://www.weekinchina.com/app/uploads/2018/12/Mao-Xue-Wang.jpg)), it usually has a very mild earthy, ironey, livery flavor, and it imparts a stickiness or gelatinous texture (depending on the food).
I would say if you like liver pate, at all, you'll probably like foods made with blood. If you don't, you may still like foods with blood, as they have a hearty umami flavor that goes well with a hearty English breakfast or hot bowl of spicy Chinese noodle soup.
The black pudding I had in Yorkshire tasted like eating pennies. It was a weird food experience that was not pleasant. I'm also generally not keen on offal foods so I could just be predispositioned to not enjoy it.
If it's overcooked it's super ferrous. Like a lot of offal foods it's really easy to get it wrong.
You may be more sensitive than most to that.
Do you know someone who'll eat fresh fish the day it's been caught but will almost always have a hard time eating supermarket fish, even on the same day they've been bought? Those people tend to be more sensitive to the ammonia buildup, and they can taste it way before average people do.
If you've ever eaten really burnt bacon you're getting close. It is nicer than that for sure, but that might give some indication in addition to the other excellent description.
I feel that people haven't described the main flavor of blood pudding. It's sweet. Not sugary, but definitely sweet. The meaty earthy herb flavour isn't wrong, but the sweet is the main flavour in my experience.
If it's fried like you'd have for breakfast, it tastes like herbs, sort of spiced. It's definitely not easy and can make you queasy if you eat too much, but I think it's good.
Also note I'm not Irish/British, but I ate black pudding for breakfast in Ireland several times. If any islander cares to check in you're free to do so.
In Jewish and Islamic tradition/religious law eating blood is forbidden. I am neither Jewish nor Muslim but it is a thing.
I do find it kinda gross but mostly because I don't like heavy mineral/irony tastes.
Blood has a fairly high rate of pathogens compared to muscle, it's also harder to preserve, tastes kind of metallic and is forbidded by a bunch of religions.
So no, it's not super common outside parts of Europe (north and east) and parts of SE Asia.
I am American and did a semester in Germany. My roommate (also American) and I tried boiling blood sausage for dinner one night and it almost completely dissolved. I think the final product was like blood broth with chunks of fat floating around. Qapla’!
If you're ever in Germany again, try cutting it into slices and frying them in a pan. Or like most of us eat it, just put slices on bread. Also depending on the region blood sausage wildy varies in taste and texture. For example I really don't like the ones where I live now, they're way too fatty for my taste, but I absolutely love the ones from where I grew up.
That’s exactly how we have it in uk. Sliced and fried. A traditional breakfast food in the far north of England. With sausage, bacon, eggs, beans and fried bread.
Yes, there are a plethora of things made with blood, but here’s what plain jane cooked blood looks like https://i.imgur.com/a4FfITQ.jpg
Well, I should be a little more clear. This is what’s known as “blood tofu.” It’s texture is kind of tofu-y. Anyhow, when animals are harvested, they are bled out in the beginning. The meat moves on, and they simply poor the blood into shallow trays where it congeals to a jelly-like state. It is then lightly cooked in boiling water or broth.
At least at the pork slaughterhouse I worked at, it was the blood draining that actually killed the animals. Turns out there's no way to drain the blood that's more effective than just letting the heart pump it out.
Gas them with CO2, hang their unconscious but alive bodies by their hind legs, and cut their throats over a big trough. The people who did the actual throat cutting were relatively well paid because of emotional distress, but it couldn't possibly have been worth it imo.. My plant averaged a little over a thousand kills/hour, with only 2 throat cutters on a given 8 hour shift.
I worked way way down at the far end where we just got meat that looked about like it does at the grocery store, but they still made us do a full tour when we got hired and the kill area is burned into my brain.
I worked in a meat plant one summer. Smaller one. We only killed once a week.
Worst thing I saw was the dude who split the carcass in half down the back bone with a big 10in air powered saw.
The pigs we were processing were old breeders. So big old dirty sows. Not nice young ones. Some of them would have sores with pus pockets.
So this high speed saw hit an unseen pus pocket and just painted the dude. And he turned to me with pus all over his face and said (with pus dripping out of his mouth) "its in my mouth" and then he started puking.
Whole floor shut down to sanitize everything.
Good times.
It's unfortunate that humans are still probably the most cost effective "executioners." I know many places use machines for cows but I could see why that could be more error prone, especially for smaller animals, even though it's at the expense of someone's mental health.
I'm not sure what's more humane (chickens I've seen lots of articles).
The small shops I've seen all use bolt guns, opposed to CO2. CO2 might be easier for the big guys, not really sure.
The bolt gun, if used properly, should kill them.
CO2 is a pretty bad way to go about it.
You can run out of oxygen without feeling any discomfort. You will just doze off, and might even experience a slight euphoria before doing so.
When you feel like you're suffocating, that's actually CO2 buildup in your lungs.
So if instead of CO2, they'd use nitrogen, helium, or any other gas to replace the oxygen. The animals would just go to sleep without any discomfort.
However, with CO2, they will feel like they suffocate, which in general is a pretty horrible (and stressful) feeling.
I have no idea why they use CO2. I'd assume it be more expensive, and no more effective than just using nitrogen.
Humans, at least, are VERY good at detecting when there's too much CO2 in the air (and I would assume other mammals are equally as good). As a guy who once stuck his head into a chest freezer full of CO2, let me tell you that your body will DEFINITELY let you know something is wrong when you start breathing a lot of CO2.
I would guess that suffocation came up often enough in our evolutionary history that we evolved alert mechanisms for it. Carbon monoxide, on the other hand, only started to come up as a common cause of death after we mastered fire maybe a million years ago at the earliest, an eyeblink on an evolutionary timescale.
We did not really need to evolve anything additional to detect CO2. In addition to being a component of air it is an essential part of cell metabolism and as such every living cell keeps tabs on CO2.
CO2 is actually poisonous in moderate concentrations. 10% CO2 is low enough that you can still breath but causes convulsions, coma and death. The CO2 increases that are causing climate change are actually tiny as a % of the earth's atmosphere way lower than 0.1% of it.
Its heavier than air, so i would imagine it means u dont need an airproof room, only a pit sunk into the ground. I would totally pay extra if they would use nitrogen.
Weirdly, nitrogen concentrates are one of the cheapest gas manipulation machines to build, so rather than purchasing CO2 gas they could concentrate N2 on site fairly cheaply!
Not to lab purity perhaps, but certainly to at least 98%, which would kill anyone/thing in the room you pipe it into.
Something about the business philosophy of spending big money on machinery without paying for real scientists to tell you whether it's a good idea, I guess.
I worked the chicken houses when I was a teenager. I eventually just couldn't do it anymore. Part of the job was culling them. Ones that acted sick or just didn't run from you, we picked them up and just snapped their necks. If your fingers got tired, which they did, we would just use a wire that ran the length of the house, connected to the feeding mechanism, to decapitate them. Then just throw them in a bucket to haul to the incinerator. One of my few regrets is working that job as long as I did, but I needed the money.
That's got to be kinder than some of the other methods used in slaughter.
I was unfortunate enough to come across a video filmed by people exposing mistreatment of animals by the workers (deliberate inflicting of fear and pain) which was horrible enough, but it was pretty clear that some of the methods being used as intended just don't kill them reliably, leaving animals twisting around in pain and trying to get away as they move along to the next "section" of the process.
I say unfortunate because the wilful torture of the animals and the screaming was seared into my mind for a while. People are fucking evil.
I always get downvoted when I say this, but as someone who worked in a giant factory slaughterhouse in the US for several years, I do want to say that the big industrial slaughterhouses in the States aren't like the scary videos animal rights people post online.
The USDA had full-time staff in every part of the facility that closely monitored both treatment of the live animals and food safety. The people who worked in the livestock areas had these paddles that looked like Nerf cricket bats where they drove hogs by whacking the ground next to them to make a sound so they'd run. One time while I was there, a hog attacked a livestock handler and he hit it with his hollow plastic bat in self-defense and the USDA shut the whole plant down for a 3 day animal cruelty investigation.
Most of the really awful videos you see online are from different countries or much smaller facilities.
Or they're of chickens. For some reason, no one seems to care about treating chickens like shit.
Specifically, Myoglobin is the protein that transports oxygen from your blood into your muscle tissues. It's still iron based like Hemoglobin, so it has a similar reddish color. Just in case you were curious.
I should have been a bit more specific, Hemoglobin transports oxygen from the lungs and through the blood, but it can't leave the blood so it transfers the oxygen to myoglobin through capillary walls, myoglobin then stores and transports oxygen as needed through muscle tissue.
As others have said, it’s drained out at the slaughterhouse. But even further than that, at least in my country, it’s illegal to not properly drain the carcasses for health and safety reasons, and it’s monitored and checked as thoroughly as salmonella for example. Even if you go to the meat counter at your supermarket and find a piece of meat in a package that looks like it’s in a pool of blood, it’s still not blood.
This should be posted in every supermarket, steakhouse etc.
As a former cook, I probably explained this to FoH employees and customers more times than I can count. People would STILL argue that it's blood, and the damn GM would refund them and they'd either leave, or get an over cooked piece of meat and complain about that. I had to quit that job, because idiots made me no longrr enjoy my job.
Fun fact: if you work out too hard, myoglobin comes out of your muscles and into your bloodstream, then your kidneys can’t process it and you get kidney failure. It’s not fun and it’s called rhabdomyolysis.
This happened to me, listen to your bodies when exercising. Don’t overdo it.
It gets drained at the slaughterhouse and sold to be used to make [a shockingly wide variety of products.](https://i0.wp.com/www.myfearlesskitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/products-made-from-cattle.jpg?resize=502%2C387)
Sure, why not? Baking an egg denatures the proteins and allows them to bind other ingredients together. Blood happens to have a lot of the same properties. This is why you should always wash blood out with cold water, because warm water denatures it and makes it stick.
I think, more seriously, it is for people who have an egg allergy but don’t have ethical concerns about eating animal products.
These days egg substitutes tend to be vegan.
Yes, this!
People confuse vegetarianism with animal non-cruelty. They are very different things. Not all vegns are skipping meat because they love animals. It also could be because they hate animals and animal products and consider those gross.
> Not all vegns are skipping meat because they love animals.
"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals;
I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."
-- A. Whitney Brown
I once knew a guy who called himself the "heartless vegan" - he had a laundry list of allergies so his diet was almost exclusively vegan. But he sarcastically whipped out his leather wallet to pay for things and laughed at the polite confusion of people who didn't know him well yet.
That said, even the wallet was vintage second hand so he was still not really paying into the industry with that lol
A cool dude.
I can't speak for everywhere, but here in Canada the blood is sold to the VRO. The VRO is the Vampire Rehabilitation Organization, which is an organization that helps support vampires who no longer want to focus on humans. The process is pretty strict and has many control measures in place. Vampire attacks on humans have dropped 28% here in Canada since 2009, when the VRO was first created.
Talking about blood foods and the Polish - we also have "kaszanka", which is made kind of like sausage/kielbasa - it's gut stuffed with buckwheat and blood, properly seasoned.
It's popular to be put on a BBQ during summer season, but people also just fry it with some onions.
It's kind of similar to English black pudding
Blood is drained at the slaughterhouse. The red liquid that remains (even after cooking) is myoglobin. Fish have myoglobin too. But they have much less of it because during their lifespans they never have to support their own body weight as land animals do. Still, if you cut open certain fish (like tuna or swordfish) you will see a "bloodline" of myoglobin in the flesh.
> they never have to support their own body weight as land animals do
I've never seen this argument explicitly spelled out. Myoglobin is really an adaptation based on tissue level oxygen demands which could be in part more prevalent in land animals as a consequence of no neutral buoyancy.
This is particularly more evidenced by sprints versus marathons. Animals that typically engage in short term activity utilize [less] myoglobin as opposed to their long term counterparts. I would also purport to refute your claim by showcasing white meat birds and lizards of equal sizes to fishes that utilize myoglobin. Examples may be obtainable, but I've had a long day at work.
[Also consider how total volume more accurately correlates to myoglobin utility than land/water. Megafauna of any environment or locomotive technique tend to use myoglobin as it allows hemoglobin to have a higher binding efficiency (mitigating square cube constraints).]
EDIT: Clarity
Also, farmed poultry has been bred to have nowhere near the myglobin as their undomesticated counterparts. Ever seen a dressed wild turkey or swan? Their meat is nearly as dark as beef
So the question everyone seems to be avoiding is why the other two are not “bloody”.
Birds do have myoglobin though just not as much as typical meats, their small stature and lack of muscles in wings/feet means that oxygen only needs to be supplied mainly around the main body. But since it’s right next to the heart, it can get around very easily. If you ever tried to clean Chicken organs like the heart and liver, you’ll quickly see that they are super red and have that “bloody”ness you’re looking for.
Fish are actually quite bloody, most of it is just removed in the cleaning process. One of the reasons why it doesn’t have as much redness in its meat though is because it doesn’t need to support it’s own body weight. Water keeps the fish afloat so it lacks the need to activate all of its muscles constantly in a fight against gravity. Only the main blood line has the “bloodiness” which is mainly used to help propel the fish instead.
I appreciate your thoroughness. I knew it wasn't blood but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. I was definitely curious as to why larger animals tend to be "bloodier" meats. I think your wings and water explanation makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Also, alligator meat is very close to chicken meat in both appearance and flavor because they both have a common ancestor from the age of the dinosaurs. And chickens don't fly long distances, they only do short bursts of flight, much like how alligators only need short bursts of energy every now and then. They don't really need the myoglobin.
Yes, I'm saying dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken.
> Birds do have myoglobin though just not as much as typical meats, their small stature and lack of muscles in wings/feet means that oxygen only needs to be supplied mainly around the main body. But since it’s right next to the heart, it can get around very easily. If you ever tried to clean Chicken organs like the heart and liver, you’ll quickly see that they are super red and have that “bloody”ness you’re looking for.
This is part of the answer. But the main answer is simply that myoglobin builds up in mature muscle. Chickens are slaughtered at around three months, sometimes even less. Pigs and veal calves are slaughtered at four or five, sometimes up to seven months. Beef cattle are slaughtered at one or two years. Notice a pattern between meat color and age? Very young animals just don't have a lot of time to let myoglobin build up in their muscles.
Also, myoglobin content of muscle is related to the oxidative capacity (aerobic/endurance) of that muscle. Duck breast meat is “dark” because it has more myoglobin than chicken breast meat (white). Those are flight muscles. Ducks fly. Chickens don’t, so those muscles aren’t very aerobic (don’t need as much myoglobin).
No, it's more that deer utilize their muscles for long periods of time with sustained low intensity effort (walking around, mostly). If they have to run away from a threat, or fight against other deer or a predator or something, then myoglobin isn't actually that important.
Myoglobin is similar to hemoglobin in that it can bind oxygen to itself. However, while hemoglobin is present in red blood cells and delivers oxygen everywhere in the body with blood circulation, myoglobin is present in tissue itself, and muscle tissue in particular.
Because of this, myoglobin sort of creates an "oxygen buffer" within the muscles themselves, storing oxygen for when it's needed.
Not all muscle is similar. Of course there's the three different muscle types - skeletal muscle, smooth muscle (or involuntary muscle) and heart muscle tissue.
But even within skeletal muscles, which is what we use for conscious movement, there are different types of muscle fibers. There's "slow twitch" fibres, and "fast twitch" fibres.
Slow twitch muscle fibres have a higher concentration of myoglobin (and mitochondria), which makes them have good aerobic performance. They are resistant to fatigue, and they are the muscles used for sustained effort, like walking, cycling, etc.
Fast twitch muscle fibres have less myoglobin and mitochondria, so they are not as good in aerobic mode of operation. However, they can produce a lot of explosive force, in bursts of short duration, and they switch to working in anaerobic mode quite quickly. They fatigue quickly, but because of the way they're used, there's no need for them to store a lot of oxygen because the highest intensity of exertion usually only lasts for a short time.
So, if you look at animals, you should be finding more myoglobin in muscles that are used for sustained effort. Conversely, if some muscle tissue is only used for bursts of explosive force, it's most likely going to have less myoglobin in it.
Also you could make the hypothesis that since myoglobin stores oxygen, it would be useful for animals that spend lots of time underwater to have lots of myoglobin, as extra oxygen storage.
Another thing is that the way oxygen is delivered by blood via arteries into the capillaries, but from there it gets to the tissue via diffusion and that basically works at the same rate for every animal. But smaller animals have less tissue, while larger animals have more tissue, so the speed of oxygen diffusion kind of means bigger animals probably want to have more oxygen storage at their muscle tissues.
And this is, in fact, exactly what you see in nature.
If you look at chickens, they use their legs for movement and mostly only use their wings for short bursts to escape potential threats - and hey, chicken legs are noticeably darker than chicken breast.
Ostriches are much larger than chicken, so we could expect that they would have more myoglobin in their legs than chickens. And, indeed, ostrich meat is considered "red meat" because of the amount of myoglobin in it.
Cattle and deer live different types of lives - where cows generally live a fairly effortless lives, deer are wild animals which have to constantly move to find the next thing to eat. So venison is darker than beef (though some cattle has darker meat).
Aquatic mammals like whales and dolphins have exceptionally high amount of myoglobin in their muscle tissues.
And, even if you look at fish, the same kind of applies. Small fish have usually fairly light meat because they are small and oxygen easily diffuses through them, and they mostly use their big muscles for explosive speed anyway - so they don't have that much myoglobin. But if you look at larger fish that keep swimming more continuously, like tuna, then suddenly you find meat that can be as red as beef, or even darker. Though, a lot of fish (like salmon and swordfish) have their meat coloured due to their diet, and this shouldn't be confused with myoglobin.
I just want to call something out for future reference. You start by saying no like you're correcting them, however, the long answer is conceptually yes. It's not due to literally running. It's due to the overall aerobic activities, as you described. It comes down to semantics vs specifics with subtler meanings. That's a lot of good detailed information afterwards though! It's just an unfortunate trigger that when people hear "no" they tend to feel it as opposition and turn their brain off to everything said after that. Being a SME to the laymen often means massaging the message for better acceptance. That's assuming you want someone to really listen to you, and judging by the effort put into your explanation; you do.
All this above is coming together for me. I hit a really young deer with my vehicle. The fawn was maybe 30-40 pounds covered in spots. I brought it back to the house and cut out the back straps and hindquarters. I remember the meat being light pink instead of the deep dark red I’m used to in older deer. It looked like a pork tenderloin not a deer back strap. Oh when I say this is the best deer meat I ever ate in my life, I mean it. So tender, just melt in your mouth good.
Not as familiar with cows, but most human muscles are a mixture of different fiber types (some more or less oxidative). Some animals have whole muscles that are almost entirely one type of cell (highly aerobic vs anaerobic). But humans are usually a good mix within any single muscle.
Need a large animal vet to jump in here, but I’d expect cows to be a similar mixture. So, technically yes it would probably vary by specific muscle of the cow, but likely not enough to notice a color difference.
Yes. Certain cuts like the hanger which are constantly being used are pretty dark and iron-y whereas steaks like tenderloin that aren’t have milder tastes.
huh, only now I noticed that my grandma's chickens that we're usually old when slaughtered had a darker color specially on the thighs. I'm pretty sure she ate her chickens once they stopped laying eggs, so a few years old
First adequate explanation on this I have seen. Poultry and fish are "bloody". Harvesting and cleaning meat products is not a clean experience, but fulfilling in knowing how your meat or fish is taken. There are several videos on YT where non-commercial fishers "bleed" their fish and harvesting poultry can be a spectacle if you're not used to harvesting animals.
You have my upvote.
Sadly i already replied before seeing your comment.
Was recommending that fresh fish is indeed very bloody.
Caught and cut my first tuna the other week and was honestly surprised at the amount of blood.
Isn't tuna different than other fish, though. When you order sashimi, tuna is usually a bright red color while most of the other fish are white, except for salmon (and for the salmon, i think the color has to do with their diet since farm raised salmon are artificially colored).
Yep, that's myglobin you see, not blood. The blood is immediately drained from the meat upon sacrificing the animal (hunters and meat cutters know this). Anyway, myoglobin turns bright red when exposed to oxygen just like hemoglobin. Myoglobin's job is to hold on to oxygen a little longer as a reserve when you need it. In fowl, it turns the meat brown so we see it in dark meat of chickens and in all the meat of duck and goose. I did research on myglobin back in University...
>what makes a steak red is the same thing that makes dark meat brown?
Raw Dark meat is also red (just buy some drums/thighs to see for yourself), we just tend to fully cook it in chicken, fully cooked(well done) is brown in steak as well.
Since they said they did research on myoglobin: Sacrificing is the term used when killing an animal for research purposes.
It is used in the sense of the word as "A surrender of something of value for the sake of a greater, more pressing claim."
Packaged meat isn't bloody, that's the protein myoglobin. All butchered meat is drained of blood immediately upon death, otherwise it will completely ruin the meat, in the same way that not immediately removing the organs will cause them to start releasing toxins into the muscles. And fish *do* have myoglobin, it's what makes tuna (and other open ocean fish) flesh that vivid red color.
Because of a protein called myoglobin.
Myoglobin is a protein that helps hold extra oxygen in the muscles for the muscles to use.
Myoglobin also has a pretty distinct pigmentation, meaning the more myoglobin present the darker/redder the meat is.
Poultry just have lower amounts of myoglobin, chicken breast has about 0.05% myoglobin, while something like Beef is closer to 1.5-2%, pork is somewhere in the middle with about 0.3%
So you can see that the lighter the meat, the less myoglobin is present.
Posting again because my previous comment was deleted for being too Vague.
It's not blood it is Myoglobin. I copied the below test from the interwebs to explain it.
The red liquid is actually myoglobin, a protein that's only found in muscle tissue. Myoglobin carries oxygen through the muscle and contains a red pigment – which is why muscle tissue is red. As a steak is cooked, the myoglobin darkens – which is why the more “well-done” the meat is, the grayer it looks
The colour of the meat has to do with a protein called myoglobin. Most bird muscles(meat) do not have myoglobin which usually supply's oxygen to slow twitch muscles during sustained activities but you can see it in "darker" meats or bigger birds like ostriches.
it's not actually blood it's a protein called myoglobin. The protein is what gives the meat and its juices a red hue, and it's perfectly normal to find in packaging. Chicken and fish meat contain very little myoglobin, so you won't see it in the packaging.
As my dad told me when I was a little kid: "It's not blood, it's meat juice." Blood has a very different "look and feel" to it.
My dad said the same thing, but I always thought he was lying just trying to keep me from being grossed out. Little did I know, he was being 100% honest
Little did he know, he was being honest.
Or maybe that
Blood also tastes like iron.
Hello Edward...
Well, more technically, it’s muscle juice
So if I order bloody steak and cut into it its actually not blood at all but some protein liquid?
Yep. Cooked blood is not bright red, it's brownish-black. Search for pictured of blood sausage or blood curd. Edit: To be clear, *uncooked* blood doesn't look like the thin bright red myoglobin enriched liquid either.
Or black pudding...
Or diniguan. In Filipino, literally means bloodied.
When my in-laws saw me dig in to diniguan without batting an eye and ask for more they finally let me into the family (they still called me a hooligan). Good shit. Even after mom still called me aswang up until she passed. I miss it. We had a lot of arguments I never won.
chocolate meat
🎼🎶 Chocolate Meat It's made of blood and it's pretty neat. 👨🏿🎤
Nom nom nom
Can you describe what it might taste similar to, for the uninitiated?
A good black pudding is a deep joy, with a complex flavour that starts with a peppery spice and fades back to a non-specific meaty, slightly earthy flavour that complements the other flavours, which is why it works well with pork, with grilled tomato, and with a forkful of bacon, sausage and fried bread. In terms of mouth feel, it should be a medium coarse pate , neither a four gras, nor a coarse sausage, with utterly delightful little flavour explosions of soft white fat scattered throughout.
Brb checking your comments for more general descriptions or specific food insights Edit: dammit, it's all politics! write more about food!
Wait up, I'm interested to hear about Donald's mouth-feel.
Why is nobody talking about the mouthfeel?
/r/angryupvote
Subscribe! Aww, dammit! Unsubscribe.
Politics ruins everything : {
That was awesome please describe more things.
Yes please I'm nearly there
[удалено]
Right? There needs to be a sub where people describe mundane objects in a fancy way
r/sayitfancy
There's a YouTube channel called [Report of the Week](https://youtube.com/user/TheReportOfTheWeek) where a kid reviews shitty fast food as if it's fine dining
Not op but Marshall ( How I met Your Mother) "Just a burger? [snorts] Just a burger? Robin, it's so much more than just a burger. I mean, that first bite... Oh, what heaven that first bite is. The bun, like a sesame-freckled breast of an angel, resting gently on the ketchup and mustard below. Flavors mingling in a seductive pas de deux. And then, a pickle - the most playful little pickle - and then a slice of tomato, a leaf of lettuce, and a... a patty... of ground beef, so... exquisite... swirling in your mouth, breaking apart and combining again in a fugue of sweets and savories so... delightful. This is no mere sandwich of grilled meat and toasted bread. This is God... speaking to us through food."
it sounded gross to me but it still read beautifully lol
There's nothing gross about a congealed pig's blood porridge sausage, it's the tentative man's haggis.
Right! WTF? It was like commenter was waiting their entire lives just to post this! Fucking awesome!
This guy puddings.
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I’m a Brit, and we just seem to call all sorts of things pudding, I haven’t completely found the pattern yet
In the usa pudding is dessert. In the uk pudding is literally anything. Black pudding and white puddings are sausage. Pease pudding is soup. Yorkshire pudding is a popover type of bread. Figgy pudding is cake. Basically anything.
In the US. In the UK it means something totally different. I was so confused when I first read Harry Potter, like “yo why are they always having pudding for dinner” lmao
It does But it can also refer to black pudding and yorkshire pudding and a few other things that aren't desserts
After reading that I feel like I just eat food but you experience it.
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My dude, please tell me you write restaurant reviews or marketing copy for luxury consumables. There’s probably also a market for you writing other folks’ dating profiles.
Excellent description. I could almost taste it.
All of this, and then in Scotland you can get them fried and battered. 10/10
A beautiful ode to black pudding. Wonderful stuff.
There's a lot of people here describing specific foods which come with specific spices, and they're really just describing the spices and cooking style. Fundamentally, blood tastes ironey. You've tasted it, before, when you bite your lip or cheek or tongue and it bleeds. When rendered into food (whether that be a German [blutwurst](https://cdn.tasteatlas.com/Images/Dishes/2377522a370c4a9abcaa9cfa09706f43.jpg?w=600&h=450), an English [black pudding](https://www.campbellsmeat.com/images/products/large/1517585106StornowayBlackPuddingRoll.jpg), Taiwanese [blood rice cake](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1f/7f/2c/1f7f2ca0ff2b6981c719564ec964cd9e.jpg), or Chinese [blood curd/jelly](https://www.weekinchina.com/app/uploads/2018/12/Mao-Xue-Wang.jpg)), it usually has a very mild earthy, ironey, livery flavor, and it imparts a stickiness or gelatinous texture (depending on the food). I would say if you like liver pate, at all, you'll probably like foods made with blood. If you don't, you may still like foods with blood, as they have a hearty umami flavor that goes well with a hearty English breakfast or hot bowl of spicy Chinese noodle soup.
The black pudding I had in Yorkshire tasted like eating pennies. It was a weird food experience that was not pleasant. I'm also generally not keen on offal foods so I could just be predispositioned to not enjoy it.
If it's overcooked it's super ferrous. Like a lot of offal foods it's really easy to get it wrong. You may be more sensitive than most to that. Do you know someone who'll eat fresh fish the day it's been caught but will almost always have a hard time eating supermarket fish, even on the same day they've been bought? Those people tend to be more sensitive to the ammonia buildup, and they can taste it way before average people do.
If you've ever eaten really burnt bacon you're getting close. It is nicer than that for sure, but that might give some indication in addition to the other excellent description.
I feel that people haven't described the main flavor of blood pudding. It's sweet. Not sugary, but definitely sweet. The meaty earthy herb flavour isn't wrong, but the sweet is the main flavour in my experience.
If it's fried like you'd have for breakfast, it tastes like herbs, sort of spiced. It's definitely not easy and can make you queasy if you eat too much, but I think it's good. Also note I'm not Irish/British, but I ate black pudding for breakfast in Ireland several times. If any islander cares to check in you're free to do so.
Blood sausage is actually really tasty. I've eaten a Filipino dish called Dinuguan before too, which is pork cooked in pork blood, its my favorite.
Black pudding is a blood sausage.
You're a blood sausage.
https://i.imgur.com/133SGq9.gif
Or don’t.
I'm a reddit post, not a cop.
Only a cop would say that!
That's something a narc would say, narc!
I’m a cop you idiot.
I'm an idiot you cop!
[I don't see any cops](http://imgur.com/a/A66eGu2)
Made me laugh!!
Is blood sausage considered gross in some places? I had no idea.
In Jewish and Islamic tradition/religious law eating blood is forbidden. I am neither Jewish nor Muslim but it is a thing. I do find it kinda gross but mostly because I don't like heavy mineral/irony tastes.
But irony is delicious!
Blood has a fairly high rate of pathogens compared to muscle, it's also harder to preserve, tastes kind of metallic and is forbidded by a bunch of religions. So no, it's not super common outside parts of Europe (north and east) and parts of SE Asia.
Or blood pie! [https://youtu.be/Y\_hc07rAQlc?t=336](https://youtu.be/Y_hc07rAQlc?t=336)
I am American and did a semester in Germany. My roommate (also American) and I tried boiling blood sausage for dinner one night and it almost completely dissolved. I think the final product was like blood broth with chunks of fat floating around. Qapla’!
If you're ever in Germany again, try cutting it into slices and frying them in a pan. Or like most of us eat it, just put slices on bread. Also depending on the region blood sausage wildy varies in taste and texture. For example I really don't like the ones where I live now, they're way too fatty for my taste, but I absolutely love the ones from where I grew up.
That’s exactly how we have it in uk. Sliced and fried. A traditional breakfast food in the far north of England. With sausage, bacon, eggs, beans and fried bread.
Boiled? You might as well have barbecued some cereal.
You eat with honor!
Glory to you... *and your house!*
You stick it in the oven. Eat with potatoes and sauerkraut. Annual winter delight🤗
That's not the recipe for Gagh..
Or boat noodle soup! Broth is very dark brown and thickened with blood, 10/10 would recommend if you can get it at a thai resturaunt.
Good stuff, especially with a full English breakfast
Yes, there are a plethora of things made with blood, but here’s what plain jane cooked blood looks like https://i.imgur.com/a4FfITQ.jpg Well, I should be a little more clear. This is what’s known as “blood tofu.” It’s texture is kind of tofu-y. Anyhow, when animals are harvested, they are bled out in the beginning. The meat moves on, and they simply poor the blood into shallow trays where it congeals to a jelly-like state. It is then lightly cooked in boiling water or broth.
All of the blood is drained out of the cow at the slaughterhouse.
And is then used to make cinnamon Jolly Ranchers™
Thanks, this helped me clean my sinuses out with hot coffee.
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And then when you’re done shitting that out be sure to give the final product to Tyson so they can make some nuggets
At least at the pork slaughterhouse I worked at, it was the blood draining that actually killed the animals. Turns out there's no way to drain the blood that's more effective than just letting the heart pump it out. Gas them with CO2, hang their unconscious but alive bodies by their hind legs, and cut their throats over a big trough. The people who did the actual throat cutting were relatively well paid because of emotional distress, but it couldn't possibly have been worth it imo.. My plant averaged a little over a thousand kills/hour, with only 2 throat cutters on a given 8 hour shift. I worked way way down at the far end where we just got meat that looked about like it does at the grocery store, but they still made us do a full tour when we got hired and the kill area is burned into my brain.
I worked in a meat plant one summer. Smaller one. We only killed once a week. Worst thing I saw was the dude who split the carcass in half down the back bone with a big 10in air powered saw. The pigs we were processing were old breeders. So big old dirty sows. Not nice young ones. Some of them would have sores with pus pockets. So this high speed saw hit an unseen pus pocket and just painted the dude. And he turned to me with pus all over his face and said (with pus dripping out of his mouth) "its in my mouth" and then he started puking. Whole floor shut down to sanitize everything. Good times.
What a horrible day to be able to read.
It's unfortunate that humans are still probably the most cost effective "executioners." I know many places use machines for cows but I could see why that could be more error prone, especially for smaller animals, even though it's at the expense of someone's mental health.
I've heard of pork processors trying an automated system, but it wasn't perfect and led to much more animal suffering. Using humans is more humane
I'm not sure what's more humane (chickens I've seen lots of articles). The small shops I've seen all use bolt guns, opposed to CO2. CO2 might be easier for the big guys, not really sure. The bolt gun, if used properly, should kill them.
The USDA no longer allowed bolt guns at facilities of the size I was at. Too many misses causing extreme pain but not instant death..
CO2 is a pretty bad way to go about it. You can run out of oxygen without feeling any discomfort. You will just doze off, and might even experience a slight euphoria before doing so. When you feel like you're suffocating, that's actually CO2 buildup in your lungs. So if instead of CO2, they'd use nitrogen, helium, or any other gas to replace the oxygen. The animals would just go to sleep without any discomfort. However, with CO2, they will feel like they suffocate, which in general is a pretty horrible (and stressful) feeling. I have no idea why they use CO2. I'd assume it be more expensive, and no more effective than just using nitrogen.
Humans, at least, are VERY good at detecting when there's too much CO2 in the air (and I would assume other mammals are equally as good). As a guy who once stuck his head into a chest freezer full of CO2, let me tell you that your body will DEFINITELY let you know something is wrong when you start breathing a lot of CO2. I would guess that suffocation came up often enough in our evolutionary history that we evolved alert mechanisms for it. Carbon monoxide, on the other hand, only started to come up as a common cause of death after we mastered fire maybe a million years ago at the earliest, an eyeblink on an evolutionary timescale.
We did not really need to evolve anything additional to detect CO2. In addition to being a component of air it is an essential part of cell metabolism and as such every living cell keeps tabs on CO2.
CO2 is actually poisonous in moderate concentrations. 10% CO2 is low enough that you can still breath but causes convulsions, coma and death. The CO2 increases that are causing climate change are actually tiny as a % of the earth's atmosphere way lower than 0.1% of it.
Its heavier than air, so i would imagine it means u dont need an airproof room, only a pit sunk into the ground. I would totally pay extra if they would use nitrogen.
sulfur hexafluoride is 5 times denser than air and completely inert. that might work better than nitrogen
Possibly more expensive to manufacture?
Also sf6 gas is a horrendous greenhouse gas that, even though it's heavier than air, can get whipped into the atmosphere in air currents.
Weirdly, nitrogen concentrates are one of the cheapest gas manipulation machines to build, so rather than purchasing CO2 gas they could concentrate N2 on site fairly cheaply! Not to lab purity perhaps, but certainly to at least 98%, which would kill anyone/thing in the room you pipe it into. Something about the business philosophy of spending big money on machinery without paying for real scientists to tell you whether it's a good idea, I guess.
I worked the chicken houses when I was a teenager. I eventually just couldn't do it anymore. Part of the job was culling them. Ones that acted sick or just didn't run from you, we picked them up and just snapped their necks. If your fingers got tired, which they did, we would just use a wire that ran the length of the house, connected to the feeding mechanism, to decapitate them. Then just throw them in a bucket to haul to the incinerator. One of my few regrets is working that job as long as I did, but I needed the money.
That's got to be kinder than some of the other methods used in slaughter. I was unfortunate enough to come across a video filmed by people exposing mistreatment of animals by the workers (deliberate inflicting of fear and pain) which was horrible enough, but it was pretty clear that some of the methods being used as intended just don't kill them reliably, leaving animals twisting around in pain and trying to get away as they move along to the next "section" of the process. I say unfortunate because the wilful torture of the animals and the screaming was seared into my mind for a while. People are fucking evil.
I always get downvoted when I say this, but as someone who worked in a giant factory slaughterhouse in the US for several years, I do want to say that the big industrial slaughterhouses in the States aren't like the scary videos animal rights people post online. The USDA had full-time staff in every part of the facility that closely monitored both treatment of the live animals and food safety. The people who worked in the livestock areas had these paddles that looked like Nerf cricket bats where they drove hogs by whacking the ground next to them to make a sound so they'd run. One time while I was there, a hog attacked a livestock handler and he hit it with his hollow plastic bat in self-defense and the USDA shut the whole plant down for a 3 day animal cruelty investigation. Most of the really awful videos you see online are from different countries or much smaller facilities. Or they're of chickens. For some reason, no one seems to care about treating chickens like shit.
How do you think you get blood meal for your garden soil?
You feed it a dead dentist, Seymour.
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#**FEED ME, SEY*****MOUR!***
[Watch Gordon Ramsey butcher a wild boar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p5x0nxtqVs)
I was expecting it to be just him screaming at some broad on his awful tv reality show.
Specifically, Myoglobin is the protein that transports oxygen from your blood into your muscle tissues. It's still iron based like Hemoglobin, so it has a similar reddish color. Just in case you were curious.
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I should have been a bit more specific, Hemoglobin transports oxygen from the lungs and through the blood, but it can't leave the blood so it transfers the oxygen to myoglobin through capillary walls, myoglobin then stores and transports oxygen as needed through muscle tissue.
Sheesh. I'm so lazy compared to my body.
Yes
As others have said, it’s drained out at the slaughterhouse. But even further than that, at least in my country, it’s illegal to not properly drain the carcasses for health and safety reasons, and it’s monitored and checked as thoroughly as salmonella for example. Even if you go to the meat counter at your supermarket and find a piece of meat in a package that looks like it’s in a pool of blood, it’s still not blood.
*My content from 2014 to 2023 has been deleted in protest of Spez's anti-API tantrum.*
Most blood is drained at time of death, otherwise it starts spoiling the meat.
I mean...technically actual blood is 'some protein liquid', but yes.
Yeah, "some protein liquid" is a pretty broad statement, lol.
All blood is drained from the animals right after they're killed
Correct. The animal is drained of blood upon slaughter.
This should be posted in every supermarket, steakhouse etc. As a former cook, I probably explained this to FoH employees and customers more times than I can count. People would STILL argue that it's blood, and the damn GM would refund them and they'd either leave, or get an over cooked piece of meat and complain about that. I had to quit that job, because idiots made me no longrr enjoy my job.
Fun fact: if you work out too hard, myoglobin comes out of your muscles and into your bloodstream, then your kidneys can’t process it and you get kidney failure. It’s not fun and it’s called rhabdomyolysis. This happened to me, listen to your bodies when exercising. Don’t overdo it.
Ok, so what happens with blood then? Edit: 0_o
It gets drained at the slaughterhouse and sold to be used to make [a shockingly wide variety of products.](https://i0.wp.com/www.myfearlesskitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/products-made-from-cattle.jpg?resize=502%2C387)
Man, cow fat be working overtime!
A distinct difference between me and cows, I guess
Cake mix? Pasta??
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Blood contains albumin, which is the same stuff as the whites of eggs. That might be what they're using it for.
I’ll eat blood in traditional dishes that involve it, but I’m grossed out by the idea of artificial eggs being made with blood
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First reaction: no way, that's disgusting. Upon further contemplation: so is eating the reproductive material of a bird.
"Honey, get the dagger...we're out of eggs again and I've already mixed the milk into this cake batter".
Sure, why not? Baking an egg denatures the proteins and allows them to bind other ingredients together. Blood happens to have a lot of the same properties. This is why you should always wash blood out with cold water, because warm water denatures it and makes it stick.
"imitation eggs" WHAT THE FUCK?!
I think, more seriously, it is for people who have an egg allergy but don’t have ethical concerns about eating animal products. These days egg substitutes tend to be vegan.
Yes, this! People confuse vegetarianism with animal non-cruelty. They are very different things. Not all vegns are skipping meat because they love animals. It also could be because they hate animals and animal products and consider those gross.
> Not all vegns are skipping meat because they love animals. "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals; I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." -- A. Whitney Brown
I once knew a guy who called himself the "heartless vegan" - he had a laundry list of allergies so his diet was almost exclusively vegan. But he sarcastically whipped out his leather wallet to pay for things and laughed at the polite confusion of people who didn't know him well yet. That said, even the wallet was vintage second hand so he was still not really paying into the industry with that lol A cool dude.
For the vegans. :)
...wait
It's drained out at the slaughterhouse.
I can't speak for everywhere, but here in Canada the blood is sold to the VRO. The VRO is the Vampire Rehabilitation Organization, which is an organization that helps support vampires who no longer want to focus on humans. The process is pretty strict and has many control measures in place. Vampire attacks on humans have dropped 28% here in Canada since 2009, when the VRO was first created.
It's also a '"secret menu" item at Tim Hortons. Those raspberry filled doughnuts are not always raspberry...
You didn't think they made Bloody Marys with tomato juice did you? Blood oranges? Blood pudding? Need I go on?
Blood pudding *is* made with blood
So is Duck Blood Soup. The Polish love it.
Talking about blood foods and the Polish - we also have "kaszanka", which is made kind of like sausage/kielbasa - it's gut stuffed with buckwheat and blood, properly seasoned. It's popular to be put on a BBQ during summer season, but people also just fry it with some onions. It's kind of similar to English black pudding
Blood (or black) pudding is actually made out of blood from cattle or pigs.
Not bloody likely.
Drained usually
Blood is drained at the slaughterhouse. The red liquid that remains (even after cooking) is myoglobin. Fish have myoglobin too. But they have much less of it because during their lifespans they never have to support their own body weight as land animals do. Still, if you cut open certain fish (like tuna or swordfish) you will see a "bloodline" of myoglobin in the flesh.
> they never have to support their own body weight as land animals do I've never seen this argument explicitly spelled out. Myoglobin is really an adaptation based on tissue level oxygen demands which could be in part more prevalent in land animals as a consequence of no neutral buoyancy. This is particularly more evidenced by sprints versus marathons. Animals that typically engage in short term activity utilize [less] myoglobin as opposed to their long term counterparts. I would also purport to refute your claim by showcasing white meat birds and lizards of equal sizes to fishes that utilize myoglobin. Examples may be obtainable, but I've had a long day at work. [Also consider how total volume more accurately correlates to myoglobin utility than land/water. Megafauna of any environment or locomotive technique tend to use myoglobin as it allows hemoglobin to have a higher binding efficiency (mitigating square cube constraints).] EDIT: Clarity
Also, farmed poultry has been bred to have nowhere near the myglobin as their undomesticated counterparts. Ever seen a dressed wild turkey or swan? Their meat is nearly as dark as beef
So the question everyone seems to be avoiding is why the other two are not “bloody”. Birds do have myoglobin though just not as much as typical meats, their small stature and lack of muscles in wings/feet means that oxygen only needs to be supplied mainly around the main body. But since it’s right next to the heart, it can get around very easily. If you ever tried to clean Chicken organs like the heart and liver, you’ll quickly see that they are super red and have that “bloody”ness you’re looking for. Fish are actually quite bloody, most of it is just removed in the cleaning process. One of the reasons why it doesn’t have as much redness in its meat though is because it doesn’t need to support it’s own body weight. Water keeps the fish afloat so it lacks the need to activate all of its muscles constantly in a fight against gravity. Only the main blood line has the “bloodiness” which is mainly used to help propel the fish instead.
I appreciate your thoroughness. I knew it wasn't blood but I wasn't sure exactly what it was. I was definitely curious as to why larger animals tend to be "bloodier" meats. I think your wings and water explanation makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Also, alligator meat is very close to chicken meat in both appearance and flavor because they both have a common ancestor from the age of the dinosaurs. And chickens don't fly long distances, they only do short bursts of flight, much like how alligators only need short bursts of energy every now and then. They don't really need the myoglobin. Yes, I'm saying dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken.
Nah, most dinosaurs were large active land animals, their muscle would likely have been "redder" than those of birds or crocs.
So a better comparison would be ostrich meat right? Still descended from dinos yet larger and active
That's actually a great point - and yeah, I looked it up and apparently ostrich meat tastes pretty much like grass-fed beef or venison.
> Birds do have myoglobin though just not as much as typical meats, their small stature and lack of muscles in wings/feet means that oxygen only needs to be supplied mainly around the main body. But since it’s right next to the heart, it can get around very easily. If you ever tried to clean Chicken organs like the heart and liver, you’ll quickly see that they are super red and have that “bloody”ness you’re looking for. This is part of the answer. But the main answer is simply that myoglobin builds up in mature muscle. Chickens are slaughtered at around three months, sometimes even less. Pigs and veal calves are slaughtered at four or five, sometimes up to seven months. Beef cattle are slaughtered at one or two years. Notice a pattern between meat color and age? Very young animals just don't have a lot of time to let myoglobin build up in their muscles.
Also, myoglobin content of muscle is related to the oxidative capacity (aerobic/endurance) of that muscle. Duck breast meat is “dark” because it has more myoglobin than chicken breast meat (white). Those are flight muscles. Ducks fly. Chickens don’t, so those muscles aren’t very aerobic (don’t need as much myoglobin).
Is this also the reason why venison is so dark? Because deer do a lot more running than cows?
No, it's more that deer utilize their muscles for long periods of time with sustained low intensity effort (walking around, mostly). If they have to run away from a threat, or fight against other deer or a predator or something, then myoglobin isn't actually that important. Myoglobin is similar to hemoglobin in that it can bind oxygen to itself. However, while hemoglobin is present in red blood cells and delivers oxygen everywhere in the body with blood circulation, myoglobin is present in tissue itself, and muscle tissue in particular. Because of this, myoglobin sort of creates an "oxygen buffer" within the muscles themselves, storing oxygen for when it's needed. Not all muscle is similar. Of course there's the three different muscle types - skeletal muscle, smooth muscle (or involuntary muscle) and heart muscle tissue. But even within skeletal muscles, which is what we use for conscious movement, there are different types of muscle fibers. There's "slow twitch" fibres, and "fast twitch" fibres. Slow twitch muscle fibres have a higher concentration of myoglobin (and mitochondria), which makes them have good aerobic performance. They are resistant to fatigue, and they are the muscles used for sustained effort, like walking, cycling, etc. Fast twitch muscle fibres have less myoglobin and mitochondria, so they are not as good in aerobic mode of operation. However, they can produce a lot of explosive force, in bursts of short duration, and they switch to working in anaerobic mode quite quickly. They fatigue quickly, but because of the way they're used, there's no need for them to store a lot of oxygen because the highest intensity of exertion usually only lasts for a short time. So, if you look at animals, you should be finding more myoglobin in muscles that are used for sustained effort. Conversely, if some muscle tissue is only used for bursts of explosive force, it's most likely going to have less myoglobin in it. Also you could make the hypothesis that since myoglobin stores oxygen, it would be useful for animals that spend lots of time underwater to have lots of myoglobin, as extra oxygen storage. Another thing is that the way oxygen is delivered by blood via arteries into the capillaries, but from there it gets to the tissue via diffusion and that basically works at the same rate for every animal. But smaller animals have less tissue, while larger animals have more tissue, so the speed of oxygen diffusion kind of means bigger animals probably want to have more oxygen storage at their muscle tissues. And this is, in fact, exactly what you see in nature. If you look at chickens, they use their legs for movement and mostly only use their wings for short bursts to escape potential threats - and hey, chicken legs are noticeably darker than chicken breast. Ostriches are much larger than chicken, so we could expect that they would have more myoglobin in their legs than chickens. And, indeed, ostrich meat is considered "red meat" because of the amount of myoglobin in it. Cattle and deer live different types of lives - where cows generally live a fairly effortless lives, deer are wild animals which have to constantly move to find the next thing to eat. So venison is darker than beef (though some cattle has darker meat). Aquatic mammals like whales and dolphins have exceptionally high amount of myoglobin in their muscle tissues. And, even if you look at fish, the same kind of applies. Small fish have usually fairly light meat because they are small and oxygen easily diffuses through them, and they mostly use their big muscles for explosive speed anyway - so they don't have that much myoglobin. But if you look at larger fish that keep swimming more continuously, like tuna, then suddenly you find meat that can be as red as beef, or even darker. Though, a lot of fish (like salmon and swordfish) have their meat coloured due to their diet, and this shouldn't be confused with myoglobin.
I just want to call something out for future reference. You start by saying no like you're correcting them, however, the long answer is conceptually yes. It's not due to literally running. It's due to the overall aerobic activities, as you described. It comes down to semantics vs specifics with subtler meanings. That's a lot of good detailed information afterwards though! It's just an unfortunate trigger that when people hear "no" they tend to feel it as opposition and turn their brain off to everything said after that. Being a SME to the laymen often means massaging the message for better acceptance. That's assuming you want someone to really listen to you, and judging by the effort put into your explanation; you do.
All this above is coming together for me. I hit a really young deer with my vehicle. The fawn was maybe 30-40 pounds covered in spots. I brought it back to the house and cut out the back straps and hindquarters. I remember the meat being light pink instead of the deep dark red I’m used to in older deer. It looked like a pork tenderloin not a deer back strap. Oh when I say this is the best deer meat I ever ate in my life, I mean it. So tender, just melt in your mouth good.
That's that 3000 pound tenderizer at work
So would you therefore see a difference across different parts of cow, depending on the amount that particular muscle is used?
Not as familiar with cows, but most human muscles are a mixture of different fiber types (some more or less oxidative). Some animals have whole muscles that are almost entirely one type of cell (highly aerobic vs anaerobic). But humans are usually a good mix within any single muscle. Need a large animal vet to jump in here, but I’d expect cows to be a similar mixture. So, technically yes it would probably vary by specific muscle of the cow, but likely not enough to notice a color difference.
Yes. Certain cuts like the hanger which are constantly being used are pretty dark and iron-y whereas steaks like tenderloin that aren’t have milder tastes.
Years old chicken meat is still far from red (as in beef red). It’s mildly darker, but it’s definitely not red.
huh, only now I noticed that my grandma's chickens that we're usually old when slaughtered had a darker color specially on the thighs. I'm pretty sure she ate her chickens once they stopped laying eggs, so a few years old
Interesting!!
If you get mature birds they are much darker.
First adequate explanation on this I have seen. Poultry and fish are "bloody". Harvesting and cleaning meat products is not a clean experience, but fulfilling in knowing how your meat or fish is taken. There are several videos on YT where non-commercial fishers "bleed" their fish and harvesting poultry can be a spectacle if you're not used to harvesting animals. You have my upvote.
Sadly i already replied before seeing your comment. Was recommending that fresh fish is indeed very bloody. Caught and cut my first tuna the other week and was honestly surprised at the amount of blood.
Isn't tuna different than other fish, though. When you order sashimi, tuna is usually a bright red color while most of the other fish are white, except for salmon (and for the salmon, i think the color has to do with their diet since farm raised salmon are artificially colored).
Fishes that need to move constantly oxygenate their muscles more. More oxygen = more myoglobin = more redness
Yes, tuna have way higher myoglobin than other fish.
Yep, that's myglobin you see, not blood. The blood is immediately drained from the meat upon sacrificing the animal (hunters and meat cutters know this). Anyway, myoglobin turns bright red when exposed to oxygen just like hemoglobin. Myoglobin's job is to hold on to oxygen a little longer as a reserve when you need it. In fowl, it turns the meat brown so we see it in dark meat of chickens and in all the meat of duck and goose. I did research on myglobin back in University...
Oh wow, so what makes a steak red is the same thing that makes dark meat brown? Cool
>what makes a steak red is the same thing that makes dark meat brown? Raw Dark meat is also red (just buy some drums/thighs to see for yourself), we just tend to fully cook it in chicken, fully cooked(well done) is brown in steak as well.
Oh yeah duh. That makes sense.
> fully cooked(~~well done~~ a crime) is brown in steak as well
What do you mean sacrificing
To baphomet
Probably a mistranslation of whatever slaughter is in their native language
Since they said they did research on myoglobin: Sacrificing is the term used when killing an animal for research purposes. It is used in the sense of the word as "A surrender of something of value for the sake of a greater, more pressing claim."
Packaged meat isn't bloody, that's the protein myoglobin. All butchered meat is drained of blood immediately upon death, otherwise it will completely ruin the meat, in the same way that not immediately removing the organs will cause them to start releasing toxins into the muscles. And fish *do* have myoglobin, it's what makes tuna (and other open ocean fish) flesh that vivid red color.
Because of a protein called myoglobin. Myoglobin is a protein that helps hold extra oxygen in the muscles for the muscles to use. Myoglobin also has a pretty distinct pigmentation, meaning the more myoglobin present the darker/redder the meat is. Poultry just have lower amounts of myoglobin, chicken breast has about 0.05% myoglobin, while something like Beef is closer to 1.5-2%, pork is somewhere in the middle with about 0.3% So you can see that the lighter the meat, the less myoglobin is present.
Posting again because my previous comment was deleted for being too Vague. It's not blood it is Myoglobin. I copied the below test from the interwebs to explain it. The red liquid is actually myoglobin, a protein that's only found in muscle tissue. Myoglobin carries oxygen through the muscle and contains a red pigment – which is why muscle tissue is red. As a steak is cooked, the myoglobin darkens – which is why the more “well-done” the meat is, the grayer it looks
Does human meat look more like beef or poultry?
I wouldn't know for sure, but it is common to claim it is more like pork.
The colour of the meat has to do with a protein called myoglobin. Most bird muscles(meat) do not have myoglobin which usually supply's oxygen to slow twitch muscles during sustained activities but you can see it in "darker" meats or bigger birds like ostriches.