You have been warned

  Yesterday started off as a thread about birds and quickly descended into cows and sheeps. It turns out there's a lot to say about coking meat and it wasn't going to get covered in one post so let's crack on. The point I realise I was making yesterday was that if your meat has been cooked long enough, you'll do a lot less chewing.

  I mentioned burgers and bolognese yesterday and that was not by chance. Burgers are generally cooked quite quickly, so if they're made from the shittier cuts of meat or if they contain the sweepings from the abattoir floor, expect to be giving your jaw a good workout.

  Bolognese, if you're making it properly, doesn't have this problem. There's no such thing as a 'quick' bolognese so if you notice it has a texture like chopped up rubber bands, whoever cooked it was in a bit of a hurry and needs to pay attention to the next bit.

  Bolognese is a stew and needs to be stewed for a good two or three hours. This gives all the chewy tissue time to dissolve and makes the resulting sauce a pleasure to eat. There is a similar principle that applies to birds; cook them for a long time for maximum joy.

  You might remember that I'm a huge fan of rotisserie chickens, especially the ones I find outside the traiteurs in France. They start them spinning in the morning when they open, so by the early afternoon all the tendons have dripped away leaving the skin to do the job of stopping the muscles falling all over the floor cos there ain't nothing else holding them there. In my experience, all the guides will give you enough info to make sure your chicken isn't raw when you pull it from the oven, but fuck that.

  For unsurpassed pleasure, knock down the oven temperature about twenty five percent to 140c and cook the chicken, (covered loosely with foil and sitting in a bath of wine and vegetables), for an extra hour or so, then whack up the heat to two hundred for the last fifteen minutes to brown it nicely. Life will never be the same again.

Kirk out

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