Discerning meat-eaters of Europe can look forward to tucking into "the designer steak" made in response to their exact demands in terms of tenderness and colour, courtesy of Irish research.
Scientists at the National Food Centre (NFC) have perfected the ability to produce beef according to national preference. Italians, for instance, have a distinct preference for beef with white rather than cream-coloured fat and faster-ageing meat.
A team headed by Dr Declan Troy at the Teagasc research facility in Co Dublin yesterday unveiled the designer steak "with guaranteed tenderness and colour characteristics". The secret "recipe" is adjusting the diet before slaughter and introducing new procedures to meat-processing.
With researchers at Teagasc's beef production research facility in Grange, Co Meath, they have found beef finished on a diet of concentrates is more tender than that finished on grass alone. Thus, in deference to the Italians and other continentals, cattle fed on a diet of maize silage will produce whiter fat.
At processing stage they also found that hanging carcasses from the hip results in more tender beef. Moreover, they have developed the use of infra-red and electrical devices to predict the tenderness.
"Our work has shown that combined with good carcass-hanging, higher-quality beef can be produced by manipulation of diet at pre-slaughter stage," Dr Troy explained. "It's now possible to `design' beef with particular quality attributes for specific markets." Such an ability would give the Irish beef industry a vital competitive edge in coming years, he predicted.
For beef connoisseurs, the one outstanding question is how you ensure that juicy succulent steak bought today is equally sumptuous next week, noted the NFC director, Dr Vivion Tarrant.
Teagasc has not overlooked this, for they will soon have perfected an automated system for grading Irish beef using video-imaging, which is predicted to give a new credibility and reliability to the industry. In the past, quality was very much a subjective thing, largely based on visual inspection.
The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, commended the degree of innovation that has culminated in the designer steak.
Needless to say, he wants the designer model of steak to emanate from Ireland. In an "export nation" he was happy to be able to provide whatever the consumer wanted through the use of such innovation, provided it was based on natural production.
He was at the NFC to view food innovations developed by Teagasc scientists, and to open a new, modern laboratory, which allows research on the most notorious food-borne pathogens, notably E.coli 0157. The latter "category 3" microbe is not only a threat to the public but even to scientists working on its characteristics.
But the designer food era beckons. For its part, Teagasc has devised ways of significantly reducing fat in sausages, beef-burgers and frankfurters using blends of tapioca starch, oat fibre and whey protein.
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