Báo Cáo Meat quality: Understanding of meat tenderness and influence of fat content on meat flavor

ABSTRACT
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This literature review focuses on meat tenderness and flavor, which are most important but difficultly predictable and maintained. Meat tenderness primarily relates to meat muscle while meat flavor is mostly resulted from fatty tissues. Many studies indicated that not only protein composition of muscle fibers but also handling and slaughtering conditions, genetic traits, and growth progress could affect meat tenderness. Surprisingly, there is somewhat connection between tenderness and flavor through marbling of meat cuts. The more marbling the meat cut has, the more flavor and tenderness it obtains. Some clear understandings of those quality traits of meat are important to improve quality of meat and processed meat products.

Key words: meat quality, meat tenderness, meat flavor, marbling, postmortem, connective tissues, fatty tissues