Lamb-eating myths chilled
Myths about what makes great tasting lamb have finally been put to rest after thousands of taste tests in New Zealand and the United States.
Meat company Silver Fern Farms (SFF) has released a report covering its research into lamb eating quality after 3200 consumer taste tests were done in the two countries last year.
SFF general manager of sales Grant Howie, who oversaw the research, said the major contributor to eating quality came from lamb that had been aged correctly when processed and consumers selecting the right cut and cooking method. ’’The research did not find a significant or consistent impact on lamb eating quality from such factors as breed, lamb gender, pasture, growth rates, fat cover and marbling, butt conformation, or locality. A number of these individual factors had minor impacts, but all were outweighed by the right cut and correct ageing.’’
The sheep industry had a lot of myths about what made good eating quality for lamb for years which had created arguments in different pockets of the industry, but these results could quell those arguments, he said.
‘’’It’s not an opinion, it’s pure fact.’’
The research included tests on lamb aged between one to 28 days. Howie said 90 per cent of the company’s chilled lamb was exported and it could take anywhere between three to five weeks to arrive at the end market.
Throughout that time the lamb was being aged and arrived in perfect eating quality condition, he said. While the company’s chilled product was already being aged, the company was now ageing its premium frozen lambing before freezing to give it an eating quality similar to that of chilled lamb.
The company is trialling aged frozen lamb at retail outlets in Germany. That lamb is aged for 14 days before being frozen. Lamb cuts also fed into improved eating quality.
While lamb racks were often thought to be a premium eating quality experience because they had more tender meat, selecting different muscles from the leg and individually cutting them produced better eating quality results, said Howie.
He said breeders should ideally factor eating quality traits into their selection programmes to maintain the high eating quality standards. ’’This can be achieved with technology such as SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism] chips. It is in everyone’s interest that the current high eating quality is maintained as breeders also look for other genetic improvement traits such as growth rates, disease resistance and yield.’’
The report, Lamb Eating Quality: The commercial application of findings from SFF’S consumer and on-farm research into the Eating Quality of lamb, covers the findings of New Zealand’s largest research programme into the eating quality of New Zealand lamb.
SFF chief executive Dean Hamilton said the company had grown its aged chilled sales to more than 25 per cent of total lamb sales, and there was opportunity for further growth.