Cooking Times for Meat Recipes

For meat lovers, enthusiasts, and cooks and parents, finding the delicious meat recipes for your family is not always an easy task. When you do find good meat recipes that satisfy everyone’s taste buds, it’s your job as the cook to make sure the meat you choose turns out full of flavor, juicy and tender. Another important factor, with today’s animal farming practices and processing methods, you want the meat you choose to be cooked safely to keep from causing harm to yourself, family or friends. Cooking times are as important, if not more so today than ever.

Since it’s so important to get your cooking times and meat temperatures correct, it’s a good idea to invest in a proper meat thermometer, preferably an instant digital one.

Meat recipes that use beef, lamb or duck should be medium-rare cooked. When meat temperatures in these meat recipes rise over 140 degrees F the proteins will begin to bunch, causing the meat to become chewy while the juices end up getting squeezed out.  

For meat recipes such as thick roasts of beef, lamb, pork loin and veal, the average temperature for a medium rare serving is around 130-135 degrees (54-57 deg C).  Taking the roast out of the heat at 5 deg F less than the desired temperate and allowing it to rest ten minutes ensures that juices get reabsorbed back into the muscle, keeping it moist and juicy.

Meat recipes calling for pork steaks and roasts, long considered important to cook until very well done due to the parasite trichinosis which is associated with undercooked pork. Trichinosis is no longer the dread that it was in previous years due to current farming practices, and the stress in properly cooking it. So, when using pork in meat recipes, cooking times will vary. Trichinosis is killed at 138 degree F; therefore the recommendation is to remove the chops when the temperature is 140 degrees F, while pork roasts should be removed at 135 degrees F.

Chicken and turkey meat recipes have the danger of salmonella in the juices, so these should be removed from heat when the poultry is at 165 degree F.

Ground beef, burgers and sausage meat recipes should be well cooked with the meat being served at 160 degrees F. The risk of E.coli is present at levels dangerous for children or older people when incorrect cooking times leave the meat undercooked.

 

See more - Guide to the Best Quality Meat and Cooking Technique.