Many of us love a steak. A juicy steak, with chipped potatoes and cabbage and lots of horseradish sauce. What could be finer? Then it’s a case of deciding how it appears on the plate. I like it medium rare but of late, I could have it really rare and almost bloody but never well-cooked as that seems to ruin its texture. The cut of the meat and the degree of marbling is critical too but a piece of tenderloin, sirloin or porterhouse would be ideal.
A beef tenderloin steak probably commands the highest price of all the cuts and the best cut in US terms is USDA Choice tenderloins over USDA Select (USDA, 2014).
Understanding how well a steak is done has been a feature of one research programme run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The taste, the palatability of steak, the quality of the grades, the type of cuts of meat all need to be assessed to make the choice of steak for the consumer as objective as possible. Doneness as it might be called – the degree of cooking which covers raw to well-cooked is one aspect that had not been examined too closely. If I was conducting the research I might have eaten the experimental material before it was assessed properly.
Anyway, drooling aside, scientists at Texas Technical University and at Kansas State University researched through consumer studies, the palatability ratings of various beef tenderloin steaks from USDA Choice, USDA Select and USDA Select with marbling scores from Slight 50 to 100 (as USDA High Select), all cooked to varying degrees of ‘doneness’.
In that study, steaks were assigned randomly to three categories of ‘doneness’ being very rare, medium-rare and well-done. The consumers were then able to eat four samples of their steak to their preferred levels of doneness. They were able to rate the steak on juiciness, tenderness, overall flavour and liking. Apparently, the USDA quality grade had no impact on these ratings as the consumer scored all traits with an average of 7 out of 8. Seven meant ‘like very much’. There were no differences in the percentage of samples rated as acceptable for all the palatability traits, where more than 94% of samples rated acceptable for each of the traits in all the quality grades evaluated.
The greater the degree of cooking, the lower the juiciness of the steaks so very-rare and medium-rare steaks had a higher rating for tenderness. Apparently, the consumers couldn’t tell the difference between the quality grades of USDA Choice and Select for a number of traits. It makes you appreciate the fact that as meat eaters we are more than satisfied with a good steak irrespective of its likely grading as long as it has the right level of doneness.
O’Quinn, T. G., Brooks, J. C. and Miller, M. F. (2015), Consumer Assessment of Beef Tenderloin Steaks from Various USDA Quality Grades at 3 Degrees of Doneness. J. Food Sci, 80: S444–S449. doi: 10.1111/1750-3841.12775
USDA. (2014) Natl. Carlot Meat Report. Des Moines, Iowa: Agricultural Marketing Service, Livestock and Seed Program, Livestock and Grain Market News Service. Available from: http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/lsddb.pdf.
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