Current Approaches to the Study of Meat Flavor Quality

Abstract

SUMMARY The long-term goals of food technologists and bio technologists are to design muscle foods based upon a desired function such as enriched/enhanced flavor quality. This very ambitious, yet obtainable, goal requires a complete understanding of the factors involved in the development and deterioration of flavor in muscle foods. This, of course, involves a thorough understanding of the rules governing muscle/meat structure and function and the basis for any given reaction mechanism in the muscle food. While we are still a long way from completely unlocking the puzzling relationships between meat structure and flavor, some of the technical achievements over the last few decades have provided the basic machinery to study the complex nature of the problem of food quality in general and muscle food quality in particular. Factors such as lipid oxidation, cooking temperature, storage time, Maillard product formation and activity, muscle proteins and enzymes, all play an important role in the generation and deterioration of the flavor of a muscle food. This chapter outlines some of the more recent work dealing with meat flavor.