Meat quality as affected by technological practices

Abstract

It has long been established that meat quality is greatly influenced by technological procedures. Of these qualities, tenderness is very likely the most important for the consumer, particularly in beef and, hence, most of the section concerns this eating characteristic of meat. In this paper, we therefore attempted to review the main effects of various technologies including chilling conditions, freezing, rate of pH fall, electrical stimulation and growth promoters on meat tenderness and the tenderising process. Fast and slow chilling conditions were thus found to cause a decrease in meat tenderness. As rate of pH fall and temperature are highly interdependent, a similar relationship between tenderness of meat and rate of pH drop was observed, fast and slow pH fall leading to more rougher meat. Hence, improvement in meat tenderness would be better achieved by using intermediate chilling conditions. Freezing of post-rigor meat is known to decrease water binding properties of meat and, in every case, this quality was mostly preserved by using rapid freezing together with slow thawing conditions. By contrast, this technological practice seems to increase meat tenderness, probably through damage of both the contractile structure and myofibrillar proteins themselves caused by ice crystals. Electrical stimulation of carcasses which prevents meat from cold shortening has a beneficial effect on tenderness only when associated with fast chilling conditions. When electrically stimulated muscles were slowly chilled, meat tenderness decreased significantly. The last point concerns growth promoters which appeared to negatively affect meat qualities especially tenderness.