Chapter 17 - Cooking and novel postmortem treatments to improve meat texture and tenderness

Abstract

Meat tenderness is a quality trait of importance to consumers, particularly those who are prepared to pay premium prices for quality. Each piece of meat has physical properties, with varying contribution to texture, including the extracellular connective tissue proteins, intracellular structural proteins, and degradation or disruption of these proteins. In addition, meat tissue consists of numerous molecules, which denature, interact, and solubilize at different temperature and processing conditions. New processing and cooking technologies such as vascular infusion, high-pressure processing, shockwave, ultrasound, pulsed electric field, Smartstretch/Smartshape, PiVac, sous vide ohmic heating, and gamma radiation have an effect on postmortem meat tenderization. Some of these technologies have the potential to be combined with each other or with tenderizing enzymes/chemicals for a synergistic tenderizing effect. This chapter will focus on the role of heating in meat tenderness and the emerging innovative tenderization technologies.