science

Meat tenderness

Meat tenderness is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Meat tenderness rather than just read about it. In short: 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.

Key takeaways

Meat tenderness belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Meat tenderness to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Meat tenderness from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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 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 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 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, 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. Tenderizers in the form of naturally occurring enzymes known as proteases, which can be added to food before cooking. Examples of enzymes used for tenderizing: papain from papaya, trypsin and chymotrypsin from honey, bromelain from pineapple and actinidain from kiwifruit. Marinating the meat with vinegar, wine, lemon juice, buttermilk or yogurt. Brining the meat in a salt solution (brine). Dry aging of meat at 0 to 2 °C (32 to 36 °F). 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 Improving Meat Tenderness by John Marchello and Ron Allen PPT (5 MB)

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Meat tenderness

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Meat tenderness claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Meat tenderness before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Meat tenderness ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Meat tenderness

In research: Meat tenderness appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Meat tenderness in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Meat tenderness is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Culinary terminology, Meat, Meat stubs, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Meat tenderness outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Meat tenderness in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Meat tenderness means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Meat tenderness out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Meat tenderness in simple terms?

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.

Why does Meat tenderness matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Meat tenderness?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Meat tenderness.