CALGARY (Staff) – Meat grading can reveal a lot about a carcass, but there’s still one problem – no one knows until a steak is cooked whether it’ll be tender or tough as shoe leather.
Even thought there’s a push to have uniform quality of meat, there’s no accepted system that lets producers know if they’re breeding animals that produce juicy, tender meat.
Tenderness is highly heritable, said Milton Weiss, livestock consultant for the Canadian Charolais Association, during a technical conference.
Ultimately he predicts a DNA probe could be the answer to track this quality in a live animal. This would also improve culling efforts that could identify problems when calves are just newborn.
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It could also force some breeders to dump their entire breeding program.
“Would you rather have tough meat or would you rather have a few unhappy breeders,” he said.
“DNA analysis will likely be the ultimate. When we get that then there’ll be no question as to whether these genes are for tenderness or for toughness.”
For a time, marbling was credited with making meat tender, but Weiss said that is a fallacy. Studies have shown traces of intramuscular fat are only responsible for tenderness five percent of the time.
What’s needed is an entire quality-control chain to ensure tender meat: from genetics to feeding to handling at packing houses to providing cooking directions on each package of meat, said Weiss.
He envisions a traceback program so when tough animals turn up the producer can be informed and work to correct the problem.
Australian Charolais breeder Boyd Campbell said tenderness is a problem in his country too and he bemoans the disappearance of butchers who knew how to handle meat.
In Britain, David Benson, executive-secretary of the British Charolais Association, said British meat quality is not as good as it used to be with 40 percent of the beef going for hamburger.
There is a large dairy influence in their cattle and he said that’s part of the reason their meat isn’t good enough.
