Meat tenderness is a quality trait critical to consumer acceptance and determines satisfaction, repeat purchase, and willingness to pay premium prices. The aim of this review was to explore instrumental and sensory methods for assessing meat tenderness in relation to underlying mechanisms and to identify limitations of existing methods, as well as opportunities for global standardization.
To achieve this, tenderness is defined, and the main instrumental methods for tenderness are presented, including their historical development and standardization. The significant determinants of meat tenderness are presented, encompassing connective tissue and cross-links, myofibrillar integrity, sarcomere length, intramuscular fat, and protein denaturation during cooking. The development of sensory methods for assessing meat is presented as well as the link between objective measures of texture and consumer tenderness scores.
Recent advances in statistical methods for sensory data are discussed, and considerations for future research are outlined. Keywords: tenderness, Warner-Bratzler shear force, sensory, cooking, denaturation, degradation.
How to Cite: Warner, R. Published on Tenderness is an important and characteristic trait of meat quality and includes instrumental measures and consumer and trained panel sensory assessments, which determine satisfaction, repeat purchase, and willingness to pay premium prices Sasaki et al.
Meat texture is used to describe meat tenderness, although this term also describes the firmness or coarseness of a meat surface Purchas, Research over the last 70 y has been pivotal in understanding the mechanisms determining meat texture and tenderness and industry advances in quality assurance. These industry advances and understanding of mechanisms, including biology, biochemistry, and biophysics of meat tenderness, have occurred throughout the meat supply chain and have been extensively reviewed.
