Beef Meat Marbling

What does it do to the beef.

Beef meat marbling.

I know you may be thinking that fat is bad and you want a lean steak not fatty. It sometimes looks like fine white lines running through your steak. Marbling intramuscular fat is the intermingling or dispersion of fat within the lean. It impacts the tenderness moistness and overall flavor and has become one of the most well known elements of steak evaluation.

The lean muscle has a high frequency of thin evenly distributed flecks of fat. Cattle that are raised on grain will have more marbling than grass fed beef. This is fairly intuitive since you can imagine how difficult it would be to get fat by eating grass. Graders evaluate the amount and distribution of marbling in the ribeye muscle at the cut surface after the carcass has been ribbed between the 12th and 13th ribs.

The presence of marbling has an extremely positive effect on the eating quality of beef in terms of tenderness juiciness moisture and flavour. Beef carcass quality grading is based on 1 degree of marbling and 2 degree of maturity. Marbling is fat so it is largely determined by the diet of the animal and to a certain degree the breed of cattle. These two factors are indicators of the beef s tenderness.

Usda s agricultural marketing service ams employs 200 highly skilled beef graders who sometimes with the help of electronic monitoring evaluate several factors that determine the grade including the amount and distribution of marbling. Well marbling refers to the white flecks of intramuscular fat in each cut of meat. You ve likely seen it in a raw steak before. Graders evaluate the amount and distribution of marbling in the ribeye muscle at the cut surface after the carcass has been ribbed between the 12th and 13th ribs.

Beef that is given a higher grade is usually from younger cattle and has more fat marbling. We have been taught to think that beef tenderness is caused by marbling the visible fat streaks in beef. The beef grading system developed by the united states department of agriculture is a voluntary grading system based on the meat s maturity and level of fat marbling. Beef marbling is the small flecks of fat interspersed within beef between the muscle fibers.

Marbling adds a lot of flavor and can be one indicator of how good the beef is. The fat makes the meat softer and easier to chew as there is simply less muscle fibre and collagen per unit volume of meat. Marbling is what gives beef its flavor juiciness and tenderness. These fine flecks melt during cooking adding juiciness and tenderness throughout the meat.

Beef carcass quality grading is based on 1 degree of marbling and 2 degree of maturity.