Tenderness is the most important factor in the consumer’s mind when it comes to buying meat.
Anyone who questions this need only look at the price difference between top round and strip loin steak, said a United States Department of Agriculture meat researcher.
Mohammed Koohmaraie’s job is to find out what makes meat tender and how to maximize it in every animal.
“Juiciness and flavour are the other two components that the consumer identifies as important. But tenderness is number one by a long shot and it also happens that it is the most variable and valuable of the three. As a result, there are things we can and should do about it,” he said.
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Phyllis Shand of the University of Saskatchewan agrees. She is working to improve tenderness and said further processing before delivery to stores would help eliminate the inconsistency.
The researchers spoke to the Canadian Society of Animal Science annual meeting in Saskatoon June 12.
In 2002, the Canadian Beef Information Centre surveyed 1,100 Canadians about their level of satisfaction with strip loin steaks and top round steaks.
Nearly 85 percent of strip loin steaks were graded acceptable while only 59 percent of the top round received that rating. The reason was variability in tenderness.
Koohmaraie said the technology to make beef more consistently tender exists, but needs to be refined.
“And identify those that will not and segregate them,” he said.
In an ongoing, 33 year study by the American Meat Animal Research Centre of the USDA, 34 breeds of cattle have been evaluated for tenderness.
The more Bos indicus, Brahman or Sahiwal, breeding that exists in the animal the tougher the meat.
With continental European and British breeds this isn’t generally an issue, however there are breeds in that group that tend to be tenderer.
Jersey, Pinzgauer, South Devon, Red Poll and Piedmontese tend to produce muscle tissue that is more tender than other breeds.
“The good news for other breeds is that outside of the Bos indicus the variability within a breed is greater than the variability from breed to breed,” Koohmaraie said.
Identifying animals within each breed whose progeny produce more tender meat through progeny testing or some as yet undiscovered live, direct measure is needed to reduce toughness within a bloodline, he said.
“Testing the meat’s shear force (the force teeth need to cut meat) means the animal is already dead. Dead animals don’t breed well,” he said.
Shand and Koohmaraie say that the economic potential of identifying tender animals and tenderizing the various cuts of meat is most profitable in the carcasses that are already being rated as USDA Select or Low Choice or the low end of Canadian AAA grade and Canada AA.
Premium prices are already paid for higher grades.
Providing that measure on live animals has proved too unreliable to be useful.
The method Koohmaraie and his colleagues found effective was called slice shear force.
“You can tell by its name we won’t be using it on live animals. That means that accurate packer to farmer records and traceability are required to identify which sires and dams have the right genetics if we are going breed for tenderness,” he said.
The American National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has recently adopted the use the slice shear force technology and are working to establish its use at several U.S. packers to collect data to begin building a premium market for tender cattle.
Meat processors can also improve tenderness through electrical stimulation of carcasses.
Other methods of hanging carcasses by their aitch bone instead of the traditional Achilles tendon allow gravity to act on the muscle fibres and have been looked at, but due to space requirements for packers, as well as the distortion of some meat cuts, it will not likely be adopted.
A hanging method that has some merit is the tendercut process, requiring the severing of non-muscle tissues of the carcass, placing greater weight on the muscle fibres.
After the packing plant stage, tenderization can be introduced by marinating the meat.
“Sixty percent of American fresh pork is moisture enhanced. That means it is marinated so the characteristic dry, tough pork that is often the product of mistakes made in the kitchen is countered by the addition of water,” said Shand.
Koohmaraie’s research in marination dating back to the late 1980s goes beyond the traditional addition of sodium tripolyphosphate to enhance water holding, water and flavour.
“We have developed a process that effects the (muscle chemistry). Infusing calcium chloride into muscle tissue … resulting in a 36 percent increase in tenderness,” he said.
Shand said moisture enhancement is applied to pork and poultry and has potential to improve tenderness in beef without hurting traditional cuts of meat.
Blade tenderization is the fine slicing of muscle tissue to shorten it producing a tenderized product.
Shand said one or two passes with blade tenderizers on meat that isn’t tender has been proven to improve it dramatically.
Two large beef muscles that tend to be tough, the eye of round and top round, can have tenderness improved by double and four times respectively through blade tenderization.
