Question: What happens to the meat during the slow cooking process?
About the article "Rendang", section "Composition and cooking method".

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The chuck contains a lot of connective tissue, including collagen, which partially melts during cooking.
Meat from the chuck is usually used for stewing, slow cooking, braising, or pot roasting. 
The impaled skewers are roasted over flame-less coals of oak wood.
When the meat turns dark brown, it is ready.
The skewers are frequently turned during this process.
The melting fat is collected on flatbread by pressing pieces of flatbread against the meat as it roasts; this also serves to heat the bread. 
The first ingredient in the barbecue tradition was the meat.
Pigs came to the Americas with the Spanish explorers, and quickly turned feral.
This provided the most widely used meat used in most barbecue, pork ribs, as well as the pork shoulder for pulled pork.
The techniques used in barbecue are hot smoking and smoke cooking.
Hot smoking is where the meat is cooked with a wood fire, over indirect heat, at temperatures between 120 and 180 F (49 and 82 C), and smoke cooking is cooking over indirect fire at higher temperatures.
Unlike cold smoking, which preserves meat and takes days of exposure to the smoke, hot smoking and smoke cooking are cooking processes.
While much faster than cold smoking, the cooking process still takes hours, as many as 18.
The long, slow cooking process leaves the meat tender and juicy.
The next ingredient in barbecue is the wood.
Since the wood smoke flavors the food, the particular type of wood influences the process; different woods impart different flavors, so availability of various woods for smoking influences the taste of the barbecue in different regions.
Hard woods such as hickory, mesquite, pecan and the different varieties of oak impart a strong smoke flavor.
Maple, alder, and fruit woods such as apple, pear, and cherry impart a milder, sweeter taste.
Stronger flavored woods are used for pork and beef, while the lighter flavored woods are used for fish and poultry.
More exotic smoke generating ingredients can be found in some recipes; grapevine adds a sweet flavor, and sassafras, a major flavor in root beer, adds its distinctive taste to the smoke.
The last, and in many cases optional, ingredient is the barbecue sauce.
There are no constants, with sauces running the gamut from clear, peppered vinegars to thick, sweet, tomato and molasses sauces to mustard-based barbecue sauces, which themselves range from mild to painfully spicy.
The sauce may be used as a marinade before cooking, applied during cooking, after cooking, or used as a table sauce.
An alternate form of barbecue sauce is the dry rub, a mixture of salt and spices applied to the meat before cooking. 
"Loab" refers to the final stage in cooking, when the oil used during cooking rises to the surface to give the dish a finished appearance.
This occurs mostly with slow cooking of gravy dishes. 
Basting is a cooking technique that involves cooking meat with either its own juices or some type of preparation such as a sauce or marinade.
The meat is left to cook, then periodically coated with the juice.
Prominently used in grilling, rotisserie, roasting, and other meat preparations where the meat is over heat for extended periods of time, basting is used to keep meat moist during the cooking process and also to apply or enhance flavor.
Improperly administered basting, however, may actually lead to the very problem it is designed to prevent: the undesired loss of moisture (drying out) of the meat.
If not compensated by countermeasures, the opening of the oven door and the resulting loss of temperature and moisture content of the air circulating inside can lead to increased evaporation from the meat surfaces.
To prevent this, the easiest solution is to place the meat in a closed oven bag, which traps evaporating moisture and does not let it disseminate into the oven space and then out to the kitchen.
The meat is "auto basted" when the air trapped inside the bag reaches the point of its maximum possible moisture content, and the resulting precipitate forms into drops on the surfaces of the meat or the wall of the bag.
The drops roll down to the lowest point of the closed space, where the meat sits and cooks in the resulting juices.
This technique often requires minimal or no added liquids other than what the meat already contains, for loss of moisture is virtually negligible from inside the bag.
Perhaps even better, some oven pans are designed to carry a lid.
Other alternatives include allowing extended cooking time, administering increased amounts of juices, coating the meat with moisture rich fruits or fat-rich cuts, such as bacon, or actual fat, place moisture rich fruits and vegetables around the cooking meats, and if possible, using a convection oven.
This is a type of cooking usually recommended for dishes that generally taste mild, but are served with sauces that provide complementing or overpowering flavor to them, for example Chicken chasseur.
Basting is a technique generally known to be used for turkey, pork, chicken, duck, and beef (including steak), but may be applied to virtually any type of meat.