EAT UP YOUR COW SKIN, HOOVES AND BONES!

Through Hydrolyzing Their Protein

When you tenderize meat with papain (enzyme extracted from papaya), you are actually hydrolyzing protein.

For thousands of years, people have been hydrolyzing protein to make it more digestible. In times of food shortages, people would eat the skin, tendons, muscles, hoofs and cartilage of animals. These parts are high in protein.  The skin of large animals such as cattle, horses and camels are too tough to chew. Therefore, the long chains of proteins that make the parts so tough are hydrolyzed or broken down into shorter chains (called peptides) to make them more edible. Usually this is accomplished by boiling for a long time with acid, alkali or through enzymatic action. The enzymes from pineapple and sap of papaya are two of the traditional methods to break down the protein chains.

Both humans and animals secrete proteolytic enzymes to break down protein into amino acids as part of digestion. Enzymes speed up the process (between 160 to a million times faster) and do not need high heat to occur, making them suitable choices to hydrolyze protein commercially. The jar of baby food, special weightlifters’ hydrolyzed Casein protein drink or patients’ special diet may well be ‘pre-digested’ by proteolytic enzymes (also called proteases).  

Manufacturers extract proteolytic enzymes like trypsin, chymotrypsin and pepsin from animal organs. Rennin is extracted from the gastric juices of calves and lambs. It is used to coagulate milk into cheese and hydrolyze protein.

When the hydrolyzing process occurs for too long, the protein is broken down completely into its component amino acids and become gelatin. The product of hydrolysis may also be called gelatin hydrolysate, hydrolyzed collagen or collagen peptide.

People not only eat hydrolyzed protein, they also noticed gelatin is very sticky and harden when cooled.

What do you think people do with a substance with such properties when they did not eat it? I will tell you the answer in the next installment.