HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Tenderness is a quality of meat gauging how easily it is chewed or cut. Tenderness is a desirable quality, as tender meat is softer, easier to chew, and generally more
palatable Palatability (or palatableness) is the hedonic reward (i.e., pleasure) provided by foods or fluids that are agreeable to the "palate", which often varies relative to the homeostatic satisfaction of nutritional, water, or energy needs. The palatabil ...
than harder meat. Consequently, tender cuts of meat typically command higher prices. The tenderness depends on a number of factors including the meat grain, the amount of connective tissue, and the amount of fat. Tenderness can be increased by a number of processing techniques, generally referred to as ''
tenderizing Tenderness is a quality of meat gauging how easily it is chewed or cut. Tenderness is a desirable quality, as tender meat is softer, easier to chew, and generally more palatable than harder meat. Consequently, tender cuts of meat typically command ...
'' or ''tenderization''.


Influencing factors

Tenderness is perhaps the most important of all factors impacting meat eating quality, with others being flavor, juiciness, and succulence. 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. 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. 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. Cooking causes melting of the fat, spreading it throughout the meat and increasing the tenderness of the final product.


Testing

The
meat industry The meat industry are the people and companies engaged in modern industrialized livestock agriculture for the production, packing, preservation and marketing of meat (in contrast to dairy products, wool, etc.). In economics, the meat industry i ...
strives to produce meat with standardized and guaranteed tenderness, since these characteristics are sought for by the consumers. For that purpose a number of objective tests of tenderness have been developed, gauging meat resistance to
shear force In solid mechanics, shearing forces are unaligned forces acting on one part of a body in a specific direction, and another part of the body in the opposite direction. When the forces are collinear (aligned with each other), they are called t ...
, most commonly used being ''Slice Shear Force'' test and ''Warner–Bratzler Shear Force'' test.


Tenderizing

Techniques for breaking down collagens in meat to make it more palatable and tender are referred to as ''tenderizing'' or ''tenderization''. There are a number of ways to tenderize meat: *Mechanical tenderization, such as pounding or piercing. *The tenderization that occurs through cooking, such as
braising Braising (from the French word ''braiser'') is a combination-cooking method that uses both wet and dry heats: typically, the food is first browned at a high temperature, then simmered in a covered pot in cooking liquid (such as wine, broth, coc ...
. *Tenderizers in the form of naturally occurring enzymes, which can be added to food before cooking. **Examples of enzymes used for tenderizing: papain from papaya, bromelain from pineapple and actinidin from
kiwifruit Kiwifruit (often shortened to kiwi in North American, British and continental European English) or Chinese gooseberry is the edible berry of several species of woody vines in the genus ''Actinidia''. The most common cultivar group of kiwifru ...
. * Marinating the meat with vinegar, wine, lemon juice,
buttermilk Buttermilk is a fermented dairy drink. Traditionally, it was the liquid left behind after churning butter out of cultured cream. As most modern butter in western countries is not made with cultured cream but uncultured sweet cream, most mod ...
or yogurt. *
Brining In food processing, brining is treating food with brine or coarse salt which preserves and seasons the food while enhancing tenderness and flavor with additions such as herbs, spices, sugar, caramel or vinegar. Meat and fish are typically ...
the meat in a salt solution (
brine Brine is a high-concentration solution of salt (NaCl) in water (H2O). In diverse contexts, ''brine'' may refer to the salt solutions ranging from about 3.5% (a typical concentration of seawater, on the lower end of that of solutions used for b ...
). * Dry aging of meat at . * Velveting * Sodium bicarbonate


Research

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.


References


External links

* Culinary terminology Meat {{meat-stub