Meat tenderness

Tenderness is a category of tenderizing or tenderization.

Influencing factors

Tenderness is perhaps the most important of any factors impacting meat eating quality, with others being flavor, juiciness, & succulence.

Tenderness is a race complex to obtain & gauge, and it depends on a number of factors. On a basic level, these factors are meat grain, the amount and composition of connection tissue, and the amount of fat. In profile to obtain a tender meat, there is a complex interplay between the animal's pasture, age, species, breed, protein intake, calcium status, stress ago and at killing, and how the meat is treated after slaughter.

Meat with the fat content deposited within the steak to throw a marbled array has always been regarded as more tender than steaks where the fat is in a separate layer. Cooking causes melting of the fat, spreading it throughout the meat and increasing the tenderness of theproduct.