One of Natural Meat Tenderizer

Hi,
wow, it's amazing how I can post 2 posts in 2 days, I normally too lazy for it, haha!
So, as I promised in the last post, I am sharing about a little secret about meat tenderizing. Well, maybe I'm not the only one who knows that, anyway..
As a new immigrant family (I never thought to be an immigrant in my life before), we didn't bring a lot of things to move here. Not that we HAVE a lot of things :p Pressure cooker is one 'fancy' thing that I don't have here. Back in Jakarta, I could use my Mom's. Maybe pressure cooker is not so expensive for some people, but you know, we just starting to make a living here. We have to be very careful in spending money. We don't feel sorry for ourselves. No, we don't. We enjoy very well living here. It's peaceful and I can really concentration to my little family here.
Back to topic.
My hubby is meat-y person. That's why meat is one of the dish that always exist in weekly menu. So, I Google(as usual) to find a way to tenderize meat without pressure cooker. Beside, my hubby and I agreed that pressure cooker could results the texture that we don't really like. I don't know how to explain this. It is also seems to lost it's juice and flaky.
I've heard about pineapple and papaya as tenderizer before. So is the Google said too.
So, I tried pineapple few times. I don't know was it me or the pineapple, but the beef still hard to chew and it was also dry as if losing their juice. I remember long time ago I use pineapple too long and my stir-fried beef turned into mush.
Then I Google again and I found about yoghurt. Yes, yoghurt. Apparently yoghurt has been well known as meat tenderizer in Indian cooking. So, I guess it's not really a secret isn't it? :( About -I don't know- how many million Indians already know this. Shame on me!
But I will tell anyway, who knows somebody in this world still don't know that. *please raise your hand*
I tried it once to beef. It was actually much better than pineapple. My hubby love it. I love it. Then I tried to lamb. My toddlers can eat it. My hubby just cut the meat to smaller pieces and my sons can actually enjoy it. The meat more tender, and moist, but still has it's chewiness(but not hard) as a meat should be.

So, for one kilograms of lamb, I used only a heaped tablespoon of plain unsweetened yoghurt.

I didn't wash the lamb, just smear and make sure that the yoghurt cover all the meat. You can use your hand or spoon. I left them in the fridge, went shopping, then back to cook. I washed the lamb before cooking, because the recipe doesn't require yoghurt in it.

I don't know how long is it supposed to be marinated, but I think I just let the lamb sit about couple of hours. Beef might need longer time to be soaked in yoghurt than lamb. However, for further information about how long should it be sit, and how can yoghurt tenderize meat, you can find it here, here and here.

I use this yoghurt which is using vegetarian friendly gelatine to avoid any gelatine that made of animal (which could be not Halal), as we are Muslims.


Oh, they also said that buttermilk can work as well. But I never try it yet.
I think this is easy and worth it very much. I think it's better than buying bottled tenderizer, especially if it made out of chemical that I don't know about.

Very well, see you later!