Psychophysical investigations into the tenderness of meat

Tenderness of five veal meat cuts was determined by two groups of subjects: a panel of skilled butchers and a consumers' panel. The butchers estimated tenderness with and without assistance of visual information. For the consumers a procedure to measure the oral sensation by a forced choice method of successive comparison was developed. It was shown that: imprecision of the opinions of the consumers was greater than that of the butchers; use of additional visual information did not affect the butchers' precision; and the butchers' views of tenderness had a poor relationship to the consumers' oral perception of this quality.