Let me expound on my theory of stall here since this would have been a bit off topic for a different post I made. I'm sure someone here can correct me if I'm completely wrong.
Me, I like to think of a stall as a culinary phase change- add heat to ice from a deep freeze and it'll stall at 32F as it makes the phase change from solid to liquid. There's something in the meat that also undergoes something like a phase change around that 150 degree mark. It might not be a complete change from a solid to liquid, but maybe something more like a glass transition change (really, I'm not a materials scientist). It could be the fat (mmmmm.... fat), it could be the connective tissue breaking down, I don't know.
Actually, my first comparison wasn't a water phase change but more like with candy making. Your sugar water solution easily gets to a boiling point, but keep boiling it and with more time and more heat it'll make it to the various stages- soft ball, hard ball, crack, etc. and it stalls many times along the way. It's still the same ingredient- sugar and water- but the crystalline structure keeps changing at each point.
Meat is the same way- keep adding heat and you can do some wonderful things to it. The trick is in adding the heat slowly enough to let it do its work while adding it fast enough to get done in a reasonable amount of time. The way we do that is by adjusting the temperature we're cooking at. But it's still really the application of heat, not keeping the oven at a given temperature.
I mean, that's pretty much what you're doing with a crock pot/slow cooker. It's not like you're maintaining a given temp, you're just adding heat slowly enough to properly break down the meat. If you can make a microwave oven output at a low enough power, it too might work as a slow cooker.
With candy making, there were the old tests for the stages and that's why they're named things like "soft ball" and "hard crack." Only when we started getting all scientific with it and using thermometers did we assign temperature ranges to the stages.
That's how it is with meat now- 190=sliced butt, 200+ degrees=pulled pork.
I'm not too sure where I'm going with this: Stall as a materials property effect. Slow application of heat good (for this purpose- not so good for stir frying). Cooker temperature is just a side effect of slow heat. How you apply the heat doesn't really matter so long as the rate is consistent (maybe that's why BGEs and high heat-capacity cooking vessels are so nice. This includes ceramics and cast iron like tandori ovens, dutch ovens, brick pizza/bread ovens, etc. Hmmm... they're all ovens...). I should probably change that to the heat should be both consistent and even.
So, stall is to be expected, maybe even good. You might even be able to get some sort of measure of the property of the meat by how long the stall is (given a consistent application of the heat). If it's fat breaking down, then the longer the stall is, the more fat there is (or it's a different kind of fat).
As an aside, I wonder if the USDA or some other organization uses something like the BMI fat-measuring scales on meat. Yeah, measuring density of a slab of meat isn't that hard, but this might have its advantages...
Me, I like to think of a stall as a culinary phase change- add heat to ice from a deep freeze and it'll stall at 32F as it makes the phase change from solid to liquid. There's something in the meat that also undergoes something like a phase change around that 150 degree mark. It might not be a complete change from a solid to liquid, but maybe something more like a glass transition change (really, I'm not a materials scientist). It could be the fat (mmmmm.... fat), it could be the connective tissue breaking down, I don't know.
Actually, my first comparison wasn't a water phase change but more like with candy making. Your sugar water solution easily gets to a boiling point, but keep boiling it and with more time and more heat it'll make it to the various stages- soft ball, hard ball, crack, etc. and it stalls many times along the way. It's still the same ingredient- sugar and water- but the crystalline structure keeps changing at each point.
Meat is the same way- keep adding heat and you can do some wonderful things to it. The trick is in adding the heat slowly enough to let it do its work while adding it fast enough to get done in a reasonable amount of time. The way we do that is by adjusting the temperature we're cooking at. But it's still really the application of heat, not keeping the oven at a given temperature.
I mean, that's pretty much what you're doing with a crock pot/slow cooker. It's not like you're maintaining a given temp, you're just adding heat slowly enough to properly break down the meat. If you can make a microwave oven output at a low enough power, it too might work as a slow cooker.
With candy making, there were the old tests for the stages and that's why they're named things like "soft ball" and "hard crack." Only when we started getting all scientific with it and using thermometers did we assign temperature ranges to the stages.
That's how it is with meat now- 190=sliced butt, 200+ degrees=pulled pork.
I'm not too sure where I'm going with this: Stall as a materials property effect. Slow application of heat good (for this purpose- not so good for stir frying). Cooker temperature is just a side effect of slow heat. How you apply the heat doesn't really matter so long as the rate is consistent (maybe that's why BGEs and high heat-capacity cooking vessels are so nice. This includes ceramics and cast iron like tandori ovens, dutch ovens, brick pizza/bread ovens, etc. Hmmm... they're all ovens...). I should probably change that to the heat should be both consistent and even.
So, stall is to be expected, maybe even good. You might even be able to get some sort of measure of the property of the meat by how long the stall is (given a consistent application of the heat). If it's fat breaking down, then the longer the stall is, the more fat there is (or it's a different kind of fat).
As an aside, I wonder if the USDA or some other organization uses something like the BMI fat-measuring scales on meat. Yeah, measuring density of a slab of meat isn't that hard, but this might have its advantages...
