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Meat tenderness

Tenderness is perhaps the most important of all factors impacting meat eating quality, with others being flavor, juiciness, and succulence.^[2]

Tenderness is a quality complex to obtain and gauge, and it depends on a number of factors. On the basic level, these factors are meat grain, the amount and composition of connective tissue, and the amount of fat.^[1] In order to obtain a tender meat, there is a complex interplay between the animal's pasture, age, species, breed, protein intake, calcium status, stress before and at killing, and how the meat is treated after slaughter.^[3]

Meat with the fat content deposited within the steak to create a marbled appearance has always been regarded as more tender than steaks where the fat is in a separate layer.^[3] Cooking causes melting of the fat, spreading it throughout the meat and increasing the tenderness of the final product.^[1]

Testing[edit]

The meat industry strives to produce meat with standardized and guaranteed tenderness, since these characteristics are sought for by the consumers.^[4] For that purpose a number of objective tests of tenderness have been developed, gauging meat resistance to shear force, most commonly used being Slice Shear Force test^[5] and Warner–Bratzler Shear Force test.^[6]

Tenderizing[edit]

Techniques for breaking down collagens in meat to make it more palatable and tender are referred to as tenderizingortenderization.

There are a number of ways to tenderize meat:

• Mechanical tenderization, such as pounding^[7] or piercing.^[7]
• The tenderization that occurs through cooking, such as braising.^[8]
• Tenderizers in the form of naturally occurring enzymes known as proteases, which can be added to food before cooking.^[7][9]
  • Examples of enzymes used for tenderizing: papain from papaya,^[8] trypsin and chymotrypsin from honey,^[10][11] bromelain from pineapple and actinidin from kiwifruit.
• Marinating the meat with vinegar, wine, lemon juice, buttermilkoryogurt.^[7]
• Brining the meat in a salt solution (brine).^[7]
• Dry aging of meat at 0 to 2 °C (32 to 36 °F).^[8]
• Velveting
• Sodium bicarbonate^[12]

Research[edit]

Efforts have been made since at least 1970 to use explosives to tenderize meat and a company was founded to try to commercialize the process; as of 2011 it was not yet scalable.^[13]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Improving Meat Tenderness by John Marchello and Ron Allen PPT (5 MB)

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