Meat Juiciness and Water Content

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the juiciness of a cooked meat product is closely tied to its capacity to retain water.

The visual appeal of fresh meat is gauged by its ability to hold water, impacting consumers' decision-making when contemplating a purchase. Meat juiciness is a pivotal element in shaping the overall dining experience and is crucial in determining meat texture, thus contributing to its variety.

Improving flavor, assisting in the tenderness of meat for easier chewing, and prompting saliva production in the mouth are among the benefits linked to juiciness. The moisture level and lipid composition are fundamental factors influencing juiciness, with marbling and fat around the edges playing a role in preserving water.

Meat juiciness is thought to arise from the moisture released during chewing and saliva, influenced not only by meat-related factors like fat content but also by the physiological and psychological characteristics unique to individual tasters.

Inadequate water-holding capacity results in reduced cooking yields and often leads to the perception of meat as "dry" due to a lack of juiciness.
Meat Juiciness and Water Content

Sensory study in meat

Sensory study is a scientific method employed to evaluate consumer products based on how they are perceived through the senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing.

The sensory experience and characteristics of a product play a crucial role in determining food choice, consumption, and whether consumers will become repeat buyers. If a food item possesses an unpleasant smell, unappealing appearance, or distasteful flavor, it is likely to be rejected by consumers.

For centuries, this type of analysis has been utilized to accept or reject food products. Historically, it has been considered a complementary methodology to assess food quality in conjunction with technological and microbiological safety evaluations.

One advantage of sensory evaluation is its ability to directly quantify how people perceive various attributes of meat. It can also uncover individual preferences. However, this approach does have certain drawbacks, including being time-consuming, expensive, and subject to significant variation between different individuals and even within the same person. Additionally, human judgments can be influenced by irrelevant factors. Three major attributes contributing to the sensory perception of meat quality are tenderness (or texture), juiciness, and flavor.

Meat tenderness is a complex characteristic influenced by several structural and metabolic factors, such as connective tissue concentration, final pH, muscle contraction during rigor mortis, and, notably, the activity of proteolytic enzymes, calpains, and cathepsins.

Recognized as the most critical quality trait for consumer acceptability of fresh meat, meat tenderness strongly influences consumer satisfaction and, in turn, repeat purchases.

Meat juiciness is typically evaluated through sensory assessment, and its definition may vary among studies. It can refer to the overall perception of moisture in the mouth during chewing (referred to as sustained juiciness), where saliva formation might play a role. Alternatively, juiciness can describe the amount of moisture released from the food after the initial few chews.

Regarding meat flavor from a sensory perspective, it involves the aroma perceived through the olfactory senses before consumption, the flavor aroma sensed during chewing, and the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, and salty detected by taste receptors on the tongue.
Sensory study in meat

Beef meat texture

Palatability is defined as the overall eating experience surrounding a food product; in beef products, this typically focuses on tenderness, juiciness, and flavor, in addition to their interaction.

Such factors include the degree of maturity, color of lean, texture, and finally the degree and distribution of marbling.

Properties of beef texture include both initial (first bite with incisors) and overall tenderness (after multiple chews) as well as more complex sensory attributes of chewing and mouthfeel with multiple descriptors such as fiber cohesiveness, adhesion, friability, chew count, mealiness, mushiness, softness, amount of residual connective tissue, rubberiness, and hardness.

The texture sensation of meat is influenced by the presence of several factors including the amount of intramuscular fat, water holding capacity, the state of the actomyosin complex and the quantity and, mostly, the quality of collagen.

Meat juiciness also plays a key role in meat texture, probably contributing to its variability. The tenderness of cooked meat will be largely influenced by connective tissue and myofibrillar components. This is because during heating, a number of chemical changes associated with the muscle fibres and connective tissues occur. The cooking temperature therefore has a marked effect on the force deformation curve for meat.
Beef meat texture