The Quality Characteristics of Cold Cuts Processed from Beef and Buffalo Meat: A Comparative Study

Abstract

T he water buffaloes (Bubalus bubalis) have a total population of 204 million spreading worldwide in 129 countries. Around 198 million of them (97.0%) are reared in Asia, with India accounting for 54% of them, 3.50 million are in Africa, almost entirely in Egypt (3.4 million), 1.98 million in America, and 0.47 million in European countries. Moreover, the world production of buffalo meat is about 4.30 million tons of which 90% from Asia and 1% from African countries (FAO, 2021). Buffalo meat is rated healthier than beef due to its lower contents of fat and cholesterol (Kandeepan et al., 2009), in addition to its higher contents of protein (Naveena et al., 2004) and oleic fatty acid (Tamburrano et al., 2019), which considered one of the most important fatty acid for the human body. Although buffalo meat is equivalent to beef in most of the physicochemical and organoleptic parameters (Anjaneyulu et al., 1990), it is rarely used primarily as table meat because most buffaloes are slaughtered when their useful working life has ended, resulting in poor meat quality characteristics (Naveena and Kiran, 2014), especially unacceptable toughness and darker color (Modi et al., 2004).The reasonable domestic needs, the higher lean and lower fat as well as good binding properties (Kandeepan et al., 2009) make buffalo a potential source of good technological properties meat that has recently gained significance. Moreover, the rapid and continuous increase in the beef price, which is the basic raw material for manufacturing different meat products made many consumers unable to