The tenderness of cooked and raw meat from young and old beef animals

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Abstract
The shortening‐toughness relationships for sternomandibularis muscles of young ox and large old bull have been compared. In both, toughness, measured by tenderometer, increases to a maximum at a shortening of 40%, and declines steeply from there at higher shortenings. This characteristic peaked relationship is obtained for ox and bull cooked both at 60 and 80 °C. However, toughness values for meat cooked to 60 °C are only about half those for meat cooked to 80 °C. In contrast to these similarities in the relationships for young and old animals, the rate of toughness increase with shortening in ox is considerably less than in bull. Thus toughness of ox at a given shortening and cooking temperature is considerably lower than that for bull, especially at high shortenings. A further distinction is made between the animals in that raw ox muscle does not give a peaked shortening‐toughness relationship, whereas raw old bull does. The results have shown that for longissimus and sternomandibularis muscles a trained taste panel is only sensitive to variations in toughness in the lower half of the range of shear force values determined by tenderometer. In the light of this, live animal characteristics and muscle shortening are both important in determining toughness measured by taste panel.