Minhota breed cattle: carcass characterisation and meat quality affected by sex and slaughter age

Abstract

This work focuses on the effect of slaughter age (6 and 9 months) and sex on carcass characteristics and meat quality of the Minhota cattle breed. In this study, data from 52 cattle (34 entire males and 18 females) were used for the carcass and meat characterisation. Regarding carcass characteristics, entire male carcasses (158 kg and 223 kg for animals of 6 and 9 months, respectively), were heavier than female carcasses (130 kg and 161 kg for animals of 6 and 9 months, respectively), with better dressing percentages, increased lengths, thicknesses and depths and compactness indexes. The quality of meat from carcasses of both entire males and females had strong luminosity (L*), a pale pink tone (lower a*-value) and high yellowness. Mean tenderness of Longissimus thoracis, expressed as shear force, was below 5.5 kg/cm2, without significant differences (P > 0.05) between either the slaughter age or sex.

Meat quality of Limousin young bulls slaughtered at 6, 9 and 12 months of age

“…In many studies the effects of different slaughter ages on beef meat quality has been examined (Ahnström et al, 2012;Lucero-Borja et al, 2014); however, most of them focused mainly on animals slaughtered at the age of more than 12 months (Bureš & Bartoň 2012;Girard et al, 2012;Humada et al, 2014). Only few publications concerned the meat quality of younger cattle (Prado et al, 2015;Araujo et al, 2016). Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, available literature sources lack information on glycogen content of beef meat as the main indicator of its quality; most of the published results concern pork meat (Przybylski et al, 2016).…”