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

Meat tenderness

The most important aspect of meat quality is its eating quality or overall eating satisfaction, being a function of the combined effects of tenderness, juiciness, and flavour. Meat tenderness is the most difficultly predicted trait, but it is very important to meat quality and consumer acceptance. Tenderness is based on ease of chewing that is contributed by many factors. Among them, the fibrous nature of muscle contributes to chewing resistance

The fact that many myofibrils are arranged in register across the muscle fibers leads to more strength for muscle and decreases muscle tenderness.

Variation in beef tenderness may be attributed to breed (genetic status), carcass composition, and environmental factors (chronological age, time on feed, implants and ante-mortem stress). The three factors that determine meat tenderness are background toughness, the toughening phase and the tenderization phase. While the toughening and tenderization phases take place during the post-mortem storage period, background toughness exists at the time of slaughter and does not change during the storage period.

The tenderization process is estimated to begin soon after slaughter (perhaps as soon as 3 h, but it is highly variable among individual carcasses).

Current evidence suggests that proteolysis of key myofibrillar proteins is the cause of meat tenderization. These proteins are involved in:
*Inter-myofibril linkages (e.g., desmin and vinculin),
*Intra-myofibril linkages (e.g., titin, nebulin, and possiblytroponin-T),
*Linking myofibrils to sarcolemma by costameres (e.g. vinculin and dystrophin), and
*The attachment of muscle cells to the basal lamina (e.g. laminin and fibronectin).

The function of these proteins is to maintain the structural integrity of myofibrils.
Meat tenderness

Sirloin cut of beef

The degree of tenderness of a particular cut of beef depends on what part of the animal it comes from. The meat along the backbone of the ribs and loin or short loin is the most tender.

The sirloin is the upper hip of the carcass. It is located between the short loin and the round primal on the beef carcass.

Sirloin is divided into two major sections: top sirloin and bottom sirloin. Top sirloin contains the top sirloin and top sirloin cap; and bottom sirloin contains the flap, tri-tip and ball tip.

When it comes to value, sirloin steak is the most popular steak sold at retail. It is relatively cheap, with little waste, and can be cooked by dry heat methods such as grilling, broiling, and pan-broiling.

The steaks cut from the tri-tip end of the bottom sirloin, called culotte, or tri-tip, steaks are quite tasty when season with spice rub and grilled.
Sirloin cut of beef

Kobe beef

Kobe beef is considered by many to be the best type of beef available in the world. It is a highly specialized product.

In Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture, they pamper the black Tajima-ushi breed of Wagyu cattle with massages and a rich diet of grasses and grains.  During the sultry summer, they even feed them beer to stimulate their appetites.

In this indulgence creates highly marbled flesh with complex flavor and melting tenderness.

Wagyu cattle have a disposition to hold a higher percentage of omega 3 fatty acids. This fact is responsible for the marbled appearance of the meat, which not only functions as the trademark of Kobe beef, but also bestows upon the meat its distinctive taste.

Gourmet chefs worldwide prize Kobe beef for its full flavor, tenderness and the high amount of intramuscular fat, called ‘marbling’. In addition, the meat also is versatility when it comes to cooking. Whether raw, sautéed, grilled, fried the Kobe beef brings about some of the most delectable meals anyone could ever have.

Kobe beef is prohibitively expensive and importation from Japan is virtually impossible. The one essential rule concerning Kobe beef is that the Wagyu cattle must be slaughtered in the Kobe region of the country.
Kobe beef