Tenderness of fresh beef is an area that has been studied extensively in meat science research. Recently, it has been assessed that if a steak is rated by a consumer to have acceptable tenderness, the likelihood of overall palatability being unacceptable would be only 10% (O’Quinn et al., 2018). Undoubtedly, the industry has made considerable progress in improving the tenderness of beef in the US, as documented by the National Beef Tenderness Surveys (Gonzalez & Phelps, 2018). However, considerable lengths of postmortem aging are often used to achieve this. For instance, the latest National Beef Tenderness Survey reported the mean post-fabrication aging time for strip loins would be 27.2 days (Martinez et al., 2017). Considering this, we began examining potential strategies that could allow fresh beef steaks to reach the same level of tenderness in a shorter time.
Taking inspiration from the meat processing industry, we examined if tumbling would have beneficial impacts on the quality attributes of fresh beef loins. Although tumbling is nearly universally applied alongside enhancement with a brine or marinade solution, we questioned if brine inclusion was truly a necessary component for fresh meat application. One previous study conducted by Morrow et al. (2019) suggested that it was. Beef flanks that were tumbled in the absence of a marinade did not have similar improvements in palatability compared to those tumbled with a marinade (Morrow et al., 2019). However, considering the flank is a sheet muscle with large muscle fibers and a high content of connective tissue, we proposed that tumbling alone could exert some positive effects on the quality attributes of beef loins. Additionally, we intended to examine if additional postmortem aging applied after the tumbling process would have added benefits, potentially showing synergism between physical disruptions and proteolytic degradation.