I don’t recall how the conversation arrived on the topic, but I was explaining that one could use explosives to tenderize meat to some colleagues recently, and had to go find the story on the interwebs. And so I share with you:
Ka-Boom! A shockingly unconventional meat tenderizer
The idea of bombing meat came to Long some 30 years ago, while he was floating in his backyard pool. A mechanical engineer at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory, he worked as an explosives expert on the design of triggering mechanisms for nuclear weapons. He was very familiar with conventional explosives and the shock waves created when they go off.
“My body has about the same density as the water,” he observed, “so if somebody threw a bomb into my pool, the shock waves should go right through me.” He started thinking about what those shock waves might do to his muscle — or to a piece of steak. To find out, he recruited friends for an experiment at a privately owned explosives testing site a few miles away.
They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.
“The drum totally disappeared. There were just little pieces of paper fiber all over,” Long recalls. The meat, ejected to the side of a nearby hill, was missing for fully 15 minutes.
Once the treated meat had been retrieved, Long cooked it, along with its untreated counterpart, on a grill he had lugged to the site. The unshocked meat proved “so tough you could hardly chew it,” Long says. “But the one we shocked — it was delightful, as tender as a $10 steak in those days.”
This article is a decade old, but Long has been busy. He has several patents relating to the process.
