Effect of storage on Texture: Meat

Texture is the main quality characteristic of meat, affecting price and consumer acceptance.

Tenderness and juiciness are the main textural parameters that affect a consumer’s enjoyment in general. 

Tenderness refers to the force needed to yield the meat during chewing, and the energy needed to masticate it to the point of swallowing. Juiciness refers to the type and amount of liquid released during mastication. Some specific meat products have a different textural priority, such as the chewiness exhibited by beef jerky.

A large amount of research has been dedicated to understanding the texture of meat. However, the detailed mechanism of tenderisation is still not fully understood. Tenderness is known to be influenced by properties of the raw material, such as animal breed and age, muscle contraction, amount of connective tissue, ripening and its cooking method.

Texture Analysis in Research: Meat & Meat Substitute Products

Researchers from the Institute of Food Science, Technology and Nutrition, Madrid, have been investigating ethyl cellulose and beeswax oleogels as fat replacers in meat products. 

 

The effect of storage over 28 days was evaluated by measuring physiochemical, mechanical and viscoelastic properties of both oleogels before and after storage. They used their TA.XTplus Texture Analyser to perform penetration tests. 

 

Ethyl cellulose produced more deformable and cohesive gels with greater time- and temperature- stability than their beeswax counterparts which resulted in rigid and brittle gels. Their oxidative stability, mechanical and rheological properties were very stable during the chilled storage period, suggesting that both organogels could be stored up to 15 days prior to use without significant change in their composition or technological properties. Read more

 

How Meat Industry Leaders use Texture Analysis to get ahead of their competition

How Impossible Foods measures burger consistency with a Texture Analyser

Biochemist Patrick O. Brown, founder of Impossible Foods Inc., invented a “magic ingredient” that solves what he calls the planet’s biggest environmental problem: beef. The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants in the USA.

There’s the problem of texture – nothing feels quite like ground beef. They have identified what particular protein properties are in real meat, and they’ve gone to look for plants with plant proteins that have those same properties.

Texture Analysis: Latest Meat Applications

Collagen is the major fibrillar component and protein in both human and animal connective tissue. It is applied in medical preparations such as wound dressings and tissue engineering.

Meat and poultry production industries result in large amounts of organic waste, rich in collagen. Scientists from the University of Oslo have been investigating collagen from turkey tendons as a promising sustainable biomaterial for pharmaceutical use. The aim of this study was to isolate and characterise pepsin soluble collagen from turkey tendons.

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 8: Sliced meat and Quorn – texture comparison

Sliced meat: how does it hold together?
 
How a sliced meat or meat substitute holds together is an important textural expectation of the consumer. The binding characteristics of the sliced product can be greatly affected by its formulation and processing thus affecting its tensile strength.

Whilst tensile grips or pneumatic grips are the traditional choice for tensile testing there are alternatives for a soft and thin product such as sliced meat. A Film Support Rig (shown in Figure 16) is designed to hold small amounts of thin or film-like material in a drum configuration in order to measure the biextensional properties of the films using a puncture test. 

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 7: Meatballs and nuggets – texture comparison

Despite the simplicity of penetration tests when faced with a non-homogeneous product, penetration is highly compromised as a smaller surface area for measurement is also more sensitive to variations in sample structure and low reproducibility and misleading data is obtained. 

Results may show a wide variance between maximum and minimum forces depending on whether the probe meets with, for example, internal structure variation such as is usually present in meat products.

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 6: Paté and pastes – texture comparison

Paté & Pastes: Measuring Paté Firmness
 
More and more often paté is being eaten as a snack spread onto toast, bread or crackers. It is usually made by pre-cooking liver and other meats, mixing them with other ingredients, seasoning and then filling into moulds or casings. 

There are many variations as a result of using different ingredients and nowadays low fat paté is also an option. There are of course vegetarian alternatives which, more often than not, contain vegetables rather than a meat substitute.

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 5: Chicken tenderness – texture comparison

Chicken Tenderness: Multiple Shearing

Empirical methods of assessing texture are often challenged by lack of homogeneity or uniformity in samples. 

Heterogeneous systems, such as unprocessed meat products can have structural elements that can vary considerably for the same overall chemical composition. Sometimes the sample to be analysed may be of variable configuration or structure from piece to piece such as for chicken strips. 

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 4: Sausage shearing – texture comparison

Reformed Products:
Sausage Shearing using Warner-Bratzler 
 
For the testing of circular samples, the Warner-Bratzler Blade (as shown in Figure 4) is recommended, as it provides a larger cutting surface around the product at the start of the test by means of its triangular notch in the middle of the blade. 

With a slotted base insert, the knife is able to cut through the entire sausage providing a crude method with little sample preparation which lends itself ideally to quick quality determination. It is the most common biting or shearing system for the assessment of meat and meat products. 

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 1: Introduction

A health or environmental choice?

Across the country, people are choosing to eat less meat for the health of their bodies and the planet, whether for one meatless day per week or a lifetime. 

The ‘fake meat’ business has been around for decades, but it has not quite taken off due to price or down to visual, textural or flavour failure. However, the meat-fakers say they are on the verge of a breakthrough, that there is a real possibility that a new era of fake meat – nutritious, cheap and indistinguishable from the real thing, made either of synthesised animal tissue or derived from plant material – may be upon us.

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 3: Battle of the burgers – texture comparison

Perhaps the easiest of meat products to recreate is the burger or “pattie” as it can take a combination of ingredients in bulk and form a structural mass that attempts to mimic a burger with dense mouthfeel. 

The use of quinoa, brown rice, bulgur and vegetables can be successfully combined as a fibre-rich patty with the texture of a meat burger.

Predicting Consumer Juiciness Ratings of Meat

Texture is the most important sensory trait when evaluating meat products. 

According to researchers at the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada: “The four important factors that determine meat tenderness are background toughness (determined antemortem), the toughening phase during rigor onset, the tenderisation phase (during the postmortem aging period), and the denaturation/solubilisation of proteins during cooking. 

Meat and Fish Texture Measurement and Analysis

Texture is a very important parameter in the total quality of meat and meat products (i.e. whole tissue and processed meats). For the consumer’s acceptability of meat, tenderness is a crucial property. As whole tissue meat is a natural product it possesses inherent variability due to many factors. As a sample for testing this presents a common problem to assess the texture repeatably.

Processed meats have three general types: deli-styles (for example turkey, bologna), that are sliced, formed meats (meat balls, meat patties, chicken patties, chicken nuggets) and sausage-style meats which are usually tubular shaped.

Texture Analysis in action: the Meullenet-Owens Razor Shear Blade

Tests using the MEULLENET-OWENS RAZOR SHEAR BLADE (A/MORS†) are conducted on whole intact poultry fillets. This minimises the experimental errors attributable to sample preparations, shortens sample preparation time and leads to a simpler testing solution. 

This method will thereby provide advantages over existing poultry breast meat tenderness methods as it could significantly save labour, time and expertise to implement for routine quality control.

Texture Analysis in action: the Volodkevich Bite Jaws

The VOLODKEVICH BITE JAWS (HDP/VB*) fixture performs an imitative test by simulating the action of an incisor tooth biting through food. 

It comprises of upper and lower jaws which are fitted to the loadcell and Heavy Duty Platform.

A sample is positioned in the lower jaw and the biting action is provided by the compressive movement of the upper jaw shearing into the test sample.
 

Maximising meat texture – 3 popular ways to test meat

A CONVENIENT CONUNDRUM

Convenience is a key driver in the purchasing decision of today’s consumers. As they become increasingly time-poor, there is a surge in demand for easy-to-prepare foods. 

This is reflected in the success of the ready meals market which has flourished throughout Europe, even in countries where the home-cooked family meal has long been traditional. Benefitting, in particular, from the growth of the ready meals sector is the meat industry. 

In their quest for convenience, consumers are disinclined to compromise on food quality, which leaves manufacturers with the difficult task of balancing the two. Products must be reminiscent of ‘home cooking’, while being quick and easy to prepare. Although taste is a big concern, a product’s texture and mouthfeel is equally important to the consumer’s overall enjoyment. Undesirable texture can significantly reduce the appeal of ready meal foods, resulting in poor sales.