14.1.1.3: Meat Fibers and Tenderness Factors
selected template will load here
This action is not available.
Under cross-sectional inspection, muscles from different parts of the animal’s body display bundles of fibers that appear as irregularly shaped polygons. The bundle size and thickness of the connective tissue septa determine the texture of the muscles: those with small bundles and thin septa have a fine texture, and those muscles with larger bundles and more connective tissue with thick septa have a coarser texture.
The finer the texture the more precision of movement from the muscle, such as tenderloin (Figure 7). The coarse-textured muscles, such as shanks and shoulders (Figure 8), are the heavy working muscles of the body that support the full weight of the animal and therefore require less precision of movement.
Science can help explain why some muscles on a beef animal are more tender than others. There are actually three types of skeletal muscle, known as twitch fibres , with differing speeds of movement and with different colours: