ABSTRACT
Historically, the quality attributes of meat, including the tenderness, have been improved primarily by aging the carcass after the slaughter of the animal. This involves the natural biochemical processes that occur in meat, including endogenous proteolysis and various metabolic effects. Increasingly discerning consumers have put increased emphasis on meat products with desirable visual as well as textural attributes to meet their expectation of good quality. Only a small portion of the carcass can be considered readily tender, with the majority of the meat from a carcass requiring long aging times or interventions to bring the meat to a reasonable level of tenderness. Furthermore, there is the issue of developing methods to improve the tenderness quality of tougher cuts of meat to add value for the industry. Many of the methods currently used to improve the quality of meat are time consuming and require energy input. The possibility of treating meat with electric currents has been known for some time. The more recent development of pulsed electric fields (PEFs) is now emerging as a method having considerable potential for improving the quality of meat cuts. The challenge of the future will be to develop larger industrial-scale PEF equipment. There is a need to accumulate more research about how to process different cuts of meat and to understand further the extent of variability within a particular muscle type.
