The husband was watching this video on YouTube, and he called my attention to it at 22 seconds, because patents are referenced.
There's nothing wrong with searching patents for recipes, I bet many PTRC librarians have!
My first reaction: "This guy sucks at patent searches! Finding an English version of a Korean patent is super easy. I bet he missed all kinds of results!"
And then I thought that perhaps I should just try it myself, because why not find patented methods for cooking that rely on unusual methods? It sounds like there may be some interesting material out there, and I'd really like to see what the Korean patent is all about anyway.
As it turns out, it's no wonder this YouTuber did not focus much on the Korean patent. It's a very short, Korean issued only patent that barely describes a meat cooking method. The title is actually omitted. So it's not so much that he can't cook in Korean, as it is that he would have just had to pick a method of heating and then some form of flavoring from a list, and then used whatever meat desired. It's an extremely unsatisfying patent for a lot of reasons.
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| Exceedingly minimal info on how to cook your meat. |
I decided to just look for some meat cooking patents, since general cooking could include a distressingly long list of results. I've searched for food and cookery patents before; if you don't limit ingredients, it's overwhelming. After a few tweaks to my query and organizing the results, I found a few interesting options.
Many were for meat cooking equipment. I chose not to focus on exclude those, because they aren't really recipes. With that in mind, here are the best (or at least most noteworthy), genuinely patented methods for cooking your meat!
- Right off the bat I'm breaking my rules with patent 2,636,431: Device for Cooking Meat and Toasting Buns. I had to include it because the bun toasting in the same device caught my attention. Although I can hardly tell what is taking place in the diagrams, I have to assume it isn't just setting the buns on a heated surface. After all, this is a rotisserie for ground meat (???) and the buns are supposed to catch dripping juices (?!?!?!?!) while toasting, but not burning. Read the whole patent and description here.
Toast yer buns! - Patent 5,662,959 is for steam cooking of meats, which is supposed to prevent the loss of any water or moisture. Everyone is so concerned with retaining juices! I saw a lot of that in the patents. I'm starting to suspect that my own lack of experience with cooking meat--especially on grills--is affecting my perspective.
- The Art of Cooking Hams, US 1,214,627: Because some people recognize that when you cook a ham, it isn't just a task, or industry, it's an art. Since I personally dislike ham, I can't really say if this is accurate... But if it's patented, I guess it's plausible.
How to create culinary art via porcine means - You're not supposed to ask about the process or ingredients, but someone had to describe it in detail for it to be patented. Read US 3,068,104 Preparation of Sausage at your own risk.
- This invention is an overly complicated (in my opinion) method of imparting the unique flavor achieved through cooking meat by exposing it to heated wood. It requires one-time use thin sheets of wood. That seems like quite a manufacturing burden, but perhaps when US 2,423,964 was filed, it was not. The diagrams illustrate a surprising breadth of possible variations, too.
Impart a delicate, woody flavor to your meat - Need a constant minimum cooking time for a specific kind of animal? Patent 3,908,035 Method of Roasting Meat is a device that provides just such a thing! Select the meat variety, weight, and whether frozen or not, and let it do the rest. You can even view it while cooking.
- Finally, let's end with some "meat product". Patent 5,322,705 presents a method for creating a highly processed meat product that visually resembles the initial food product, generally meat. Gross!
Oh, goody, now we can all make "meat product"
