Descriptive Analysis of Meat From Young Ruminants in Mediterranean Systems

Abstract

This paper describes the rigorous methodology used to establish a descriptive panel and select ballot attributes to evaluate the sensory quality of meat from young ruminants. The work focused on sheep and cattle, which, in Spain as elsewhere in the Mediterranean area, are slaughtered at an early age to obtain light carcasses. The prescreening, screening, training and performance evaluation procedures proposed by Cross et al. (1978) were used to select and train the panel. The nonredundant, most discriminant and frequently detected attributes of aroma, flavor and texture were determined, to constitute the final ballot. The panel evaluated the sensory quality of two categories of Spanish commercial lamb: lechal, or milk‐fed lambs, slaughtered at 12 kg live weight, and ternasco, light lambs, slaughtered at 24 kg live weight, from the Lacha and Rasa Aragonesa breeds. As live weight was shown to have more effect on sensory quality than breed, each category had its own characteristic texture, aroma and flavor.

Effect of slaughter age on meat quality of Chamarito lambs

“…Among light lambs, suckling lambs reared exclusively on maternal milk are the lightest on the market (Gorraiz et al, 2000). Some authors report that increasing the carcass weight of suckling lambs has little influence on meat quality traits (Russo, Preziuso & Verità, 2003, Díaz et al, 2005a, but others have found large differences in tissue composition and meat quality over a narrow range of carcass weights in light lambs Díaz et al, 2003).…”

Effect of dietary carnosic acid on meat quality from suckling lambs

“…Suckling-lamb meat is a high quality edible product on the basis of its tenderness, juiciness and palatability (Gorraiz et al, 2000). This is the reason why in markets of the European Mediterranean area is common the presence of meat from suckling lambs 'lechales' with a slaughter age between 25 and 45 days and a carcass weight of up to 7 kg (Sañudo et al, 2007;Bernabéu and Tendero, 2005).…”

Evaluation of the sensory attributes along rabbit loin by a trained panel

“…Selection and training of assessors based on normative indications (AENOR, 2014) are necessary to obtain reproducible assessments with good discriminatory ability. There are some studies describing reference standards used in the training for meat evaluation; for example, Gasperi et al (2005) in lambs or Gorraiz et al (2000) in ruminants. To our knowledge, there is no information on reference standards used in the training of assessors in rabbit meat.…”