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.