The Secret Ingredient That Improves Meat Every Time
You may love it. You may hate it. But a smear of mayonnaise before cooking makes beef, pork, chicken and fish better as if by magic. J. Kenji López-Alt explains.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been seeing a trend among the online community of sous-vide cooking enthusiasts: rubbing meat with mayonnaise before searing it. A parallel trend has also been hitting the grilled cheese forums (there’s a message board for everything), where folks are slathering their bread with mayonnaise before griddling, insisting that mayonnaise produces a golden-brown crust that’s superior to the one you get with butter.
At this point, I suspect that half of you are salivating subconsciously while the other half are quite consciously suppressing a gag reflex.
Even for mayo lovers like me, the image of smearing mayonnaise all over a piece of raw or semi-cooked meat is not the easiest sell. Not everyone likes mayo. It jiggles uncomfortably. It’s nearly pure fat. I get it.
