Hey, heads up. This video features some very mild shots of a very small amount of
human blood. If that's going to make you pass out or something, maybe stop operating heavy
machinery now, or watch something else. Okay? Contrary to what people say, this is not blood.
This is not blood, this is not blood, and this is not blood. There, that's blood, viscus and fire
engine red. People may call this a bloody steak, and while there is probably some trace amount of
blood in all meat, that's not what you're looking at here. Which you're looking at here is meat
juice, which goes by a number of more technical or scientific names that we will examine.
More importantly, I'm here to try to persuade you that the difference between blood and meat juice
is meaningful. This is not just some little bit of idle semantic quibbling from a pedant,
though that's obviously the kind of thing that I would do.
No, the difference between blood and juice is really big, both culinarily and culturally.
When animals are slaughtered for meat, their major arteries are cut,
and they're hung so that gravity pulls out nearly every drop of blood. The circulatory system is
fluid by design. Stuff flows easily through it, and it goes out onto the abattoir floor.
At least, that's if you do it right. If the animal is really scared or otherwise excited right before
slaughter, then the smaller blood vessels might contract a little bit, and trap a little bit of
blood inside the meat, resulting in what is known as fiery carcass in the meat industry. Google
image search fiery carcass at your own risk. But there should be hardly any blood left in
here. That liquid is known in the industry as purge, or weep, or drip. Meat is like
three-quarters water, and some of it is going to gradually leak out as the vacuum
packaging accumulates and retains every drop. Purge is meat water with a number of proteins
and dissolved solids in it. We'll get back to that. There is some blood in this chicken,
and let's see if we can find it. There, when I sliced into that bone. Blood cells are made in
the bone marrow, which you would know if you've ever broken a raw wishbone or something before.
Technically that's not blood inside the bones, it's just blood cells. It's missing the number
one component of whole, true blood, which is of course plasma, the watery portion of blood.
Let's keep looking for that real blood. Hey, there's a couple of streaks of blood there
under the breast, couple of vessels or nerves or something. Here's some kind of vessel near the
wing joint, that looks like blood to me. Lots of tiny little spots of blood that get trapped and
couldn't make it out when the chicken was bled. And there's probably microscopic quantities of
blood still clinging inside the capillaries, and other teeny tiny vessels that we can't
even see. Regardless, we can see that blood is just very different from the
protein-laden water that comes out of meat. Saying they're the same is like saying that
coffee and tea are the same. I mean they're very similar, but just fundamentally different.
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any subscription purchase. Thank you, Trade. Anyway, let's talk about why blood and meat
juice are just different things, both taste wise and functionally. We're going to need some real
blood to examine. And because carcasses are bled so effectively at the slaughterhouse these days,
there's almost no butcher shop left in the United States where you can just
buy a pint of cow's blood or whatever. The blood never makes it this far. The
slaughterhouse collects the blood from the killing floor, and parts of it get
used for pharmaceuticals. Parts of the blood get used for animal feed or plant
fertilizer. And in some cultures people eat the blood, though rarely here in the states.
Which is why if I want to show you some blood, I have to draw my own.
Got to sterilize my skin and hey, that ought to do it. Grab a medical grade lancette and here,
we should get some actual blood. The reason blood is so thick and red is because it's only
about half water. Blood is almost half red blood cells, which are relatively big, solid things.
Actually, the particular shape of blood cells makes it so that blood is very thick only
when it is still. When you kind of swirl the blood around, or move it around in some way,
it thins out. The red blood cells are very susceptible to shearing forces. And so
still blood is thick, moving blood is thin. And of course it starts to set up solid as
soon as it touches air, thanks to the platelets that make your blood clot to close wounds. When
you cook blood, as in this pre-cooked English style blood sausage, the blood sets up really
firm into something like a cake. In fact, blood has albumin in it,
the same protein in eggs that coagulates at relatively gentle heat, and that helps
to hold your cake together. The same protein is in blood. And that makes blood an excellent thickener
for soups and stews and such. You just stir a little bit of it into a simmering liquid like
a starch slurry, they do that in France. This is a bowl of tofu and duck's blood
soup filmed somewhere in East Asia, where eating blood is generally not considered
taboo. But it is taboo elsewhere, most notably in Abrahamic religious traditions like Islam. Nobody
knows where the blood eating taboo came from, historically at least. But in the meat industry,
they refer to blood as liquid meat because it's nutritionally so similar to meat, and it's just
as safe to eat as long as you cook it. I mean, if you ate a whole lot of blood,
you could potentially get iron poisoning, and that's one theory is to where the blood taboo
came from. Another hypothesis is that it might have had to do with a Pagan animal sacrifice,
which was associated with blood drinking. Regardless, a lot of people in this world
regard blood eating with some amount of disgust, and that's one reason why it matters that the
purge collected in this vacuum packed beef is not blood, even though it is very dark red.
Beef has more of the particular protein that tints meat juice, red, or pink or purple,
and that protein is myoglobin. Meat juice is mostly water with a little myoglobin mixed
in. Now, I've said that on the internet before in a TikTok video that I made a long time ago,
and apparently the audio from that video has gone kind of viral. People dub it over their
own videos of really, really red, juicy, rare steaks that they're cutting up, and that's cool.
But people comment on those videos and one thing that I see them saying is, hm, water with a little
myoglobin in it. Isn't that what blood is? No, no, no. That is not blood. The protein inside red
blood cells that makes them red is hemoglobin. Myoglobin and hemoglobin are chemically similar,
though hemoglobin is four times the size. They both contain heme, which is the iron
complex that binds to oxygen from your lungs. The function of hemoglobin is to carry oxygen
from your lungs down to your tissues. The function of myoglobin is to store that oxygen
directly inside your muscle tissue, inside the muscle cells. Myoglobin stores oxygen for future
use by your muscles. They are similar molecules, but they just aren't the same stuff. And there's
normally no myoglobin found in blood. One person on TikTok said, "Wait a minute,
if there's no myoglobin in blood, then why do they search for myoglobin in a standard
medical blood test?" I'm guessing this person maybe worked at a lab or something.
And the answer is they look for myoglobin in your blood because it would be an indication of muscle
injury. That the fluid from inside your muscle is spilling out into your bloodstream due to some
injury or something. Indeed, when we injure an animal by slaughtering it for meat, some residual
blood probably does spill into that intramuscular water. Which, in turn, leaks out as purge.
But there's probably very little blood in there, and if you have a problem with trace
blood in the juice, then you've got a problem with meat. There's trace blood in the meat too,
and no amount of washing or salting will get it out. Though probably there's so
little blood that you'd never taste it. The slightly metallic taste of red meat
is mostly due to the high myoglobin content, not trace hemoglobin. And cooking doesn't get
rid of heme proteins, it just changes their color to brown and gray, as in the case of
this medium steak that I made for the kids. We use the same color changing phenomenon to
tell when chicken is cooked all the way through. We say the juices should run clear, which really
means the juices should be translucent brown instead of translucent pink. Chicken white meat
has very little myoglobin because chickens don't fly very much, so they don't actually use this
chest muscle. It just doesn't need much oxygen. But even the dark red myoglobin juice from beef
does not taste as powerfully metallic as blood does. Because there's proportionally way less
heme protein in here, compared to actual blood. The juice is just mostly water, with a little bit
of other stuff in it. I think those little white clumps under the microscope are free fats that
clumped up in the cold of the fridge. I think. Ultimately, the biggest difference between blood
and meat juice to me is that they just taste really different. Blood cooks up really thick,
and has a powerful metallic taste that you know from cutting your lip and stuff. Meat juice is
very, very thin and it has hardly any metallic taste at all. It mostly just tastes like meat.
So there you go. That's why a rare steak is not a bloody steak, or at least it is little
more bloody than any other piece of meat. That liquid is juice, and the difference matters.