Effect of Three Cooking Methods on the Quality of Cooked Beef Joints

摘要

The effect of three cooking methods: dry heat roasting (120°C), moist heat roasting (85°C)and water cooking (85°C), on the quality of cooked beef joints was investigated with the aim to improve cooked meat quality before the cooling step. Beef joints were injected with a salt/phosphate brine and tumbled under vacuum at 4°C for 3 hours before being stuffed into elastic nettings and cooked to a core temperature of 72°C. Mean weight of samples after tumbling was 2.6 kg. In this work, the same cooling technique, air blast cooling, was applied to cool all meat samples until core temperature of 4°C. Data on mass losses and yield, cooking and cooling time, nutritional content and physical properties (water holding capacity, tenderness, hardness and cohesiveness) of the meat joints were compared. Cooking in water produced similar cook loss, cooking time and nutritional content when compared to the other two methods. Still, beef samples cooked in water were significantly more tender than dry heat roasted samples. There were no significant differences between water-cooked samples and moist heat samples. Results so far show that cooking in water could result in an advantageous method to improve meat quality at the cooking stage, rendering high quality meat product.