Chill... it's just freezing.

 

It seems so simple to just freeze something. You get meat really cold, it lasts a long time. But, we all know it is not that simple. Lots of questions arise with freezing. Questions about packaging, timing, size of cuts, type of freezer, how to thaw it and what it does to quality, all come up when freezing meat. So, let’s talk about them.

Packaging

Air is the enemy when you are freezing foods. Air allows for oxidation and freezer burn. You want to keep air away from the surface of the cuts in any way you can. For meat, the best packaging method when freezing is vacuum. Some butchers use vacuum packaging, and you can buy vacuum packaged cuts in the store. At home, you can buy a small vacuum packager and package cuts yourself. If you freeze lots of meat cuts at home, that may be a good investment for you.

Ground cuts that are packaged in chubs are essentially in vacuum, but you may get a little spoilage in the edges, near the opening, but most of the meat is protected from air.

The wax paper wrap that butchers use also works well in the freezer. It keeps the air away from the cuts pretty well, but those packages don’t last as long as vacuum. If you are buying a whole or half beef, it will take a long time to go through it all. The packages will likely be in your freezer for several months.

At home, you may want to try those freezer bags that zip closed. Make sure that you squeeze as much air out of those as you can before you close them. I try to fold them over and create a kind of seal around my cuts. Packaging like that won’t last as long as vacuum or wax paper.

The worst way to package meat for the freezer is the foam tray and overwrap like you see in the grocery store. That wrap is designed to allow oxygen through (that’s what makes the meat red), so freezing meat in those packages is just asking for freezer burn. 

Timing

The USDA guidelines state that you should consume frozen steaks, chops, and roasts within 4 to 12 months of freezing. After that, it’s not as much a safety issue, but eating quality. Juiciness, flavor, tenderness may suffer some if you wait longer than a year. In vacuum packaging in a chest or stand up freezer, whole muscle cuts last months and months.

Sausage, ground beef, and cooked meats don’t fare as well. Grinding, cooking, and adding ingredients like salt are all things that make meat oxidize more quickly and that can even happen in the freezer. USDA suggests ground beef only be stored frozen for 4 months. Cooked meats, even less than that (2-3 months).

Sizing

When you are putting fresh meats in the freezer for the first time, you want them to freeze as quickly as possible. So, smaller cuts and packages work better than large ones. If you like to buy things in bulk, its best to repackage meats into portion-sized packages and freeze it in smaller packages. Then, you can just take them out as you need them, rather than having everything frozen together. I like to flatten ground beef packages out so they will stack, and they will freeze faster.

Placement

Keeping with the concept of freezing meat as quickly as possible, you want to make sure that you spread non-frozen things out in the freezer when you first put them in there. Don’t put it all together in one place. It will take a long time to freeze, and I’ve even seen things spoil in the middle when they don’t get frozen completely.

Hopefully if you buy a large quantity of meat, it will come frozen and you can put it all in the freezer at the same time, but if you need to freeze a large quantity all at once, you may consider freezing it over several days.  Put some cuts in the freezer and spread them out, let them freeze, and put in a few more cuts the next day. Whole muscle cuts are ok for a few weeks in the fridge, so just be aware of how long they’ve been stored. If you have to freeze cuts over a few days like this, freeze the ground cuts first.

Which freezer is best?

If you are planning to store frozen meat for several months, its best to do so in a chest freezer or an upright freezer that is only a freezer. The freezer in your fridge is ok for short term freezer storage, but think about how often it is opened and every time the door opens, it loses cold air. It’s best to have your meat stored in a specified freezer, even if it’s a small one.

Thawing

A few years ago, I wrote a whole post about thawing frozen meat, and in short, it’s best to thaw meat in cold water or in the refrigerator. Cold running water works best. The microwave is ok, too. You shouldn’t set meat on the counter to thaw. You don’t want it to spend too much time in the danger zone of temperature where pathogens have a chance to grow.  Also, you can always just cook your meat from frozen.

Can I thaw and refreeze?

Yes. Some people are concerned about meat that has been frozen, thawed and refrozen. As long as it stayed below 40°F when it was thawed, food-safety wise, it should be fine. It may lose some juiciness or have flavor issues from being thawed and refrozen, but chances are, you won’t even be able to tell.

Whole muscle cuts like steaks, chops and roasts take this treatment better than ground and processed cuts. Also, you don’t want to thaw ground beef and leave it thawed for very long at all if you decide to refreeze. At refrigerated temperatures, oxidation happens and it will be accelerated in meat that has been previously frozen.

*If for some reason, your freezer loses power, don’t open it. That will just cause you to lose the cold air that’s in there. The meat will stay frozen for a while without power. When you get power back or get a new freezer, check the temperature of the meat. Is it still frozen? Is it thawed, but still cold (below 40°F)? If these are true, its probably ok to just refreeze. If the meat is at room temperature or its been over 40°F for 4-6 hours or more, you need to discard it.

What does freezing do to quality?

The answer to this question is complicated. It depends. Some aspects of quality may actually be improved with freezing. Researchers at South Dakota State found that freezing beef actually improved the tenderness of beef steaks compared to non-frozen. The ice crystals in the beef acted like tiny little tenderizers.

For the most part, in whole muscle cuts under ideal conditions, freezing doesn’t have much effect on other aspects of quality like flavor and juiciness. Leaving something in the freezer for long periods or poor packaging may result in flavor issues and loss of juiciness, though. Ground beef and processed meats are more prone to flavor problems when they have been frozen, but under good conditions (packaging and fast freezing), the benefits of storing meat in the freezer out-weighs the problems.

 

I hope my post is helpful in answering your freezing questions. Like always, please reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

Every Steak has a Story

May is National Beef Month. I don’t know who decides these months or why, but I’m glad we have a whole month devoted to a protein that I love to eat and raise. I have been mulling on the idea for this post for a while and figured May would be a great time to put my thoughts on paper, or technically, computer screen.

I love to do farm tours. We take a group of ladies on our annual Moms on the Farm Tour here in Northwest Arkansas, but we also do tours with students and other groups. A few years ago, I had some friends from Dallas come to town and ask me for something fun to do with their kids and I said, “Want to go see a dairy?” And we did. We toured a local dairy and had a great time!

On these tours, everyone loves to hear the farm story; how long the farm has been in operation, how many generations of this family have operated the farm, what crops have been raised there over the years. We love to see those farm stories in the grocery store, too. Several food companies do a great job of sharing the stories of their farmers with their consumers. People love to go to the farmers market or see ‘locally grown’ on the food they buy. I think it’s great that so many consumers want to know about their food and the farmers that produce it.

But, here is what I think people are missing… every steak has a story.

There are about ¾ of a million beef farms and ranches in the US, and over 91% are family owned or individually operated. The average size of a cow herd is 40 cows.

That means that most of the beef bought in the US came from a farmer with a story, just like the one you would hear from our ranch. The calves from our ranch aren’t sold at the farmers market or to a special store with our name on it. They go from our place to a backgrounder (like the Peterson Farm Brothers) or a feedlot operation (like the Feedyard Foodie). I’ve written a post about the segments of the beef industry. Then they will be harvested in a commercial facility and processed into beef that may go to a fancy restaurant or a small grocery store.

Cows on snow on the plains, on green grass here in
Northwest Arkansas, or in the arid mountains in New Mexico.
They all raise beef.

When you buy a steak at the store or order one in a restaurant, it could have come from a farm in Florida or a ranch in Montana. We visited a farm in Hawaii where the cows ate Noni fruit and lived within view of the Pacific Ocean. That’s the great thing about beef. Cows can live in very diverse climates and under lots of different conditions, but they all produce beef.

If you are interested in hearing more stories about farmers who raise beef and others in the beef industry, check out these blogs:

Tales of a Kansas Farm Mom

Cows Kids and Grass

Faith, Family, and Beef

Bovidiva

Beef Runner

It turned to the DARK SIDE: Why did my meat turn brown?

Today is STAR WARS day. May the 4^th (be with you). I’ve had several questions lately about meat that has turned brown. Has it really turned to the DARK SIDE?

Everyone that has bought meat has seen this happen. Maybe you take you steaks out of the package, and a little bit of brown is under the sticker on the package. Maybe you open a package of ground beef, and a little bit of brown is on the bottom of the package. Maybe you are marinating some pork chops in the fridge and they were brown in the afternoon when you got them out to cook.

It happens, and you have questions. Is it still safe to eat? Did the butcher hide this little spot under the sticker? Why did it turn brown? As a meat scientist, this is one of the most popular questions I answer.

Is it safe? If it has been kept at a cold temperature and is not way past its best-by date, most likely, yes, it is safe to eat. Smell it. You can’t smell the bacteria that will make you sick, but smelly bacteria will let you know if the meat has been at stored unsafe temperatures. If it’s not smelly, cook it using a meat thermometer.

Now, about that color…

People ask me or tell me all the time about how the butcher was trying to fool them by putting the brown spot under the sticker or how they put the fresh meat on top of the old brown meat. I realize it looks suspect, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s actually the sticker or the package that makes the meat turn brown.

I’ve talked about the changes in meat color before. It was one of my first posts and is actually one of my favorite topics and the subject of many of my research projects.

Meat turns from red to brown due to OXIDATION. If you think way back to chemistry class, you might remember that oxidation is the loss of electrons from a molecule. Meat color is controlled by a protein called myoglobin, and in the middle of myoglobin, there is an Iron. When that iron loses an electron, the protein changes shape and looks brown. We call the brown protein metmyoglobin.

So, what causes the oxidation? The change in meat color from red to brown can be caused by several events.

You pull off the packaging, and there
is the brown spot! Why?

1.  Very low levels of oxygen. That is what is happening underneath the sticker and in some packages of meat. We know that the oxygen in the air reacts with the myoglobin to make it turn red. However, when that oxygen is blocked by a sticker or part of the package, the level of oxygen is drastically lowered, causing oxidation and the brown color.

2. Time in storage. (Warning: nerdy meat scientist answer) This one is a little more complicated. When the meat turns red, the oxygen really only penetrates a little layer of the surface of the cut. So, you have a little red layer on top of a purple layer. Between those two layers of red and purple, there is a low oxygen environment and oxidation happens, so a little bit of brown, metmyoglobin forms. 

Luckily, the muscle has the ability to give the electrons back to the myoglobin (that’s called reduction, the opposite of oxidation), turning it back to purple. But, eventually, the ability of the meat to donate electrons runs out, and the brown color remains, creating a brown layer between the red and the purple. At first, you can’t see it, but with time, that brown layer will work its way to the surface that people can see. 

These steps are sped up in meat that has been on the shelf in the cooler longer (like aged meats) or by higher temperatures.

3. Salts and marinades. People love to add flavor to their meats in the form of marinades and rubs. I had a question about this just last week. Someone had bought some pork chops and placed them in the fridge to marinate all day. When they got them out to cook them, the chops had turned brown. Salt is actually a pro-oxidant. It causes oxidation. Some spices can cause oxidation, too. So it was probably the marinade that caused the meat to turn brown.

4. Freezing. Sometimes freezing meat can cause the color to change.

5. Bacteria. Yep, bacteria may produce sulfides, peroxides or other metabolites in the meat that cause it to turn brown. They also cause the meat to have a spoiled smell. We call these spoilage bacteria. They usually grow when meat has been stored at temperatures above 40°F, or stored for too long a time. When these bacteria grow, the meat turns brown, smelly, and maybe even slimy. Brown color with a putrid smell and slime are good indicators that pathogenic bacteria have also had a chance to grow and the meat may not be safe to eat. 

So, if your meat turns to the dark side, just give it a sniff. If it’s not smelly, you can probably still cook it. 

(Also, full disclosure, I'm really more of a Star Trek gal. Live long and prosper.)

It’s all in the package: Ground Beef

I'm not sure why I have this silly face.
I love to take #meatcounterselfies!

A few weeks ago, I made a quick stop in a local grocery store to pick up some stuff for office lunches. Of course, I had to swing by the meat counter for a #meatcounterselfie.

While I was there, I found four different examples of packaging ground beef in the retail case. So, I snapped a few pictures and made a quick facebook post. My post was so popular, I decided to recreate here in the blog.

Foam trays with over wrap.
One of the most popular types of packaging

Foam trays with over wrap. It's kinda like cling wrap. In the world of meat science, we call this aerobic packaging. It's aerobic because it allows oxygen to react with the protein and creates the bright red color consumers like to see.

This packaging type is pretty inexpensive and easy, but the oxygen makes the meat spoil in a couple of days. You also shouldn't freeze meat packaged this way because it's more likely to freezer burn.

Ground beef chubs

We call these packages ground beef chubs. These are 10-pound packages, but you can get chubs in 5-pound, 2-pound, and even 1-pound. They are not always in clear bags like this. Sometimes the chubs are white and only tie at one end.

This beef was packaged in the packing plant. That's good because it decreases the number of people that handled it and lowers the chances that it will spoil. They are essentially a vacuum package, which is why you see that purplish-red color. The vacuum isn't perfect. Sometimes a little air will get in on the ends.

Beef can stay safely in this package for several days, and you can stick it directly in the freezer. My friend, Dr. Casey Owens, commented that she likes to buy ground beef in these big chubs and divide it into 1-pound portions in zip-loc freezer bags. That’s a great way to save some money.

Modified atmosphere package

This is called a modified-atmosphere package. This ground beef was also packaged in the packing plant, so the number of times it’s been handled is decreased compared to foam tray packaging. It's kind of like a vacuum package because it's sealed, but it has a special blend of air in the package to help control the growth of bacteria and give the meat that pretty red color.

I wouldn't use this package to freeze the meat; I would re-package it in a zip-loc freezer bag or a home-vacuum packager.

Vacuum-sealed package

Last is a vacuum sealed package. This beef was packaged in the packing plant and is a completely sealed package. See how it's a purplish-red color?

This package will have the longest shelf-life, and meat will freeze in that package just fine. It's also nice and flat, so it will thaw easily, too.

The meat counter at this store had several different options of ground beef, and, as a meat head, it was exciting to me to see all these different ways to package it represented in one store. But, please know that all these packaging types are safe. Regardless of how the beef is packaged or processed or any claims made on the label, all ground beef should be cooked to 160 F and checked with a meat thermometer.

I have another neat post called 10 things you didn’t know about ground beef or you may enjoy any of my other posts about beef, food safety, or the labels you see on packages.

What questions do you have about things you see in the meat counter?

Ten things you didn’t know about ground beef

Ground beef is one of our favorite cuts of meat in the US, but I’ll bet that you have lots of questions about it. The USDA dictates what can and cannot be labeled as ground beef and that information is published in the Code of Federal Regulations. They call those rules ‘standards of identity’ and they apply to labels of ‘chopped beef’ and ‘hamburger’ as well as ground beef.

Here are a few things that you may not have known about ground beef:

1.       Ground beef must be from cattle. Any other animal would be considered misbranded and would be illegal.

2.       Ground beef is made from only muscle. It must be skeletal muscle. No eyes, skin, guts or anything but muscle. (As of 2017, heart is allowed in ground beef, but its really just another muscle.)

3.       Ground beef must be at least 70% lean. No more than 30% fat. It is usually leaner than that, though.

4.       Ground beef is not made from ‘leftovers’ or ‘scraps off the floor’. The fact is, not every cut of beef is equal. Some make great steaks on the grill. Others make great roasts in the oven. Some pieces of the beef carcass are either the wrong size or too tough to be tasty as whole muscle cuts. So, to get maximum use out of the entire animal, butchers collect those pieces in clean containers called lugs and grind them up into ground beef.

5.       Ground beef is the most popular cut of beef. In the US, we enjoy lots of ground beef. In fact, we like it so much that butchers are now grinding up cuts that used to be sold as steaks and roasts. In a large processing plant, the decisions on what to grind up and what to leave whole are made based on price and demand.

6.       Ground beef may not contain any added water. Beef itself contains water, but processors are not permitted to add water to the ground beef.

7.       Ground beef may not contain any phosphates, binders or extenders. Some processed meat products use non-meat fillers such as texturized vegetable protein to stretch the protein portion of a processed meat. If these ingredients are added, it cannot be labeled ground beef.



8.       Ground beef is not all the same. Some dishes work best with really lean ground beef, whereas other are tastier with fattier ground beef. Generally, the more lean the ground beef, the more costly it is. Just like people, not all animals are the same in fatness, and just like people, different parts of the animal have different amounts of fat. Think about how your thigh compares to your abdomen. (mine are different, if yours are not, congratulations) When formulating ground beef, the processors mix some of the leaner cuts (like leg muscles) in with some of the fattier cuts (like abdominal cuts) to get their target fat content.

9.       Ground sirloin, ground round, ground chuck are also ground beef, with more requirements. Those labels not only let the customer know from where on the carcass their ground meat comes, they also give the consumer the percent fat. Ground sirloin and ground round are usually labeled as 15% fat and ground chuck is usually 20% fat. You can look for the fat percentage on the label.   Special ground meats like these must be at least 50% from the source specified. (For example, ground sirloin must be made from at least 50% sirloin cuts.)

10.   Ground beef should always be cooked to 160°F. Because ground beef is ground and mixed, bacteria may be found anywhere within the patty (not just on the surface like in a steak or roast). To make sure all those bacteria are killed, you need to cook your burger to 160°F and check the temperature with a meat thermometer! Checking the temperature will also keep you from over-cooking your burgers so they will be juicy and flavorful!

I hope you have learned something about ground beef and that you enjoy your burger this summer.

Blueberry Burgers

I was asked to write a post for the Foodie Friday series on the Arkansas Women Blogger site.

I had a great time experimenting with Blueberry Burgers!

Go check it out at:

http://arkansaswomenbloggers.com/blueberry-burger/

Transformation Tuesday: from a steer to steaks

Last week, this picture came across my Facebook page.

It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, meant to be kinda funny, but it’s true.

Cattle start out as cute little calves and end up as steaks, but I think this picture does a disservice to that calf and all the cattle that are harvested for beef production.

They really become much more than one steak.

I don’t want to minimize the contribution one calf has to the food supply. If that calf grows into a steer that weighs about 1,200 lbs, it has the potential to contribute to more than 850 individual meals.

One 1,200 lb steer may produce as many as:

·         24 ribeye steaks
·         24 Kansas City strip steaks
·         12 filet mignon steaks
·         30 sirloin steaks
·         12 flat-iron steaks
·         12 pot roasts
·         4 brisket roasts
·         10 round roasts
·         12 lbs. of back ribs
·         2 flank steaks and 2 skirt steaks, which could make fajitas enough for 35 people
·         200 lbs. of ground beef, which would make 600 1/3-pound hamburgers

** You must realize that not every animal is cut up the same. Sometimes meat cutters prefer to cut T-bone steaks rather than KC strips and filets. In my scenario, I ground up a lot of steaks and roasts that some butchers might have left whole because the demand for ground beef is high right now.

Beef meals are not only tasty and filling, they are also very nutrient dense. One 3-oz serving of lean beef, provides 48% of your daily needs of protein, 44% of B₁₂, 40% of Selenium, and several other nutrients including Zinc, Niacin, B6, Phosphorus, Choline, Iron and Riboflavin.

Any way you cut it, one steer will produce A LOT more than one steak.

Last May, I wrote a post about the enormity of the US meat industry. Each week, over 500,000 cattle are harvested for beef and demand for beef is high which means that the beef industry is producing over 425 million meals of beef each week. Crazy!

How would you like that cooked?

You order steak or a burger at a restaurant and the waiter or waitress asks, “how would you like that cooked?” What is your response? Well, if you are ordering a steak, there is no wrong answer to that question. HOWEVER, you should ALWAYS order hamburgers or any other ground meat dish cooked to medium, medium well, or well done. I always order mine medium well.

Why should hamburgers be cooked to medium well, but steaks can be cooked to rare?

Today, I visited a Family and Consumer Science Class and demonstrated to them the answer to this question with play-doh. (I had to fight the little Daughter at the Meat Counter off the play doh.) I took some pictures to share on my blog.

When steaks are cut, there is a possibility that bacteria (disease-causing germs) could be on the surface of the steak. Steaks (and roasts, too) are whole-muscle cuts, meaning that they have been cut into serving- or cooking-size pieces, but the internal portion of the cut is still undisturbed. So, those bacteria are going to only be on the surface of the steak, and when you cook it, the surface will be the first to get hot and it will get the hottest. Any bacteria on the surface are going to be killed in the cooking process. The internal part of the meat does not have to get hot enough to kill any bacteria. So cooking steaks to rare or medium-rare is perfectly safe.

Do you like my little play-doh steaks? The green dots are the bacteria (only on the surface). The Daughter at the Meat Counter thought they were peas.

Ground beef is made from smaller cuts of beef that are trimmed away from the steaks and roasts. They are not lower quality or inferior in anyway other than they are too small or too tough to make good steaks are roasts. (Actually, which parts are cut into steaks and roasts and which parts are ground into hamburger is largely driven by ground beef demand. People like hamburgers.) These parts and pieces (trim) are kept in large containers and transported to the grinding room in the plant. All of these little pieces could have bacteria on their surfaces just like the steaks above. Several companies have researched different ways to treat the trim pieces to lower the bacterial count on the surface.

Here is my play-doh trim. It’s smaller and cut into irregular pieces. The bacteria are still only on the surface.

Here is where the difference is. The trim is ground. When meat is ground, it is pushed through a metal plate with small holes. Behind the plate, is a rotating knife that cuts the meat and allows it to be pushed through the plate.

This is not play-doh. I actually have pictures of real meat! Yay! You can see the round strands of ground beef coming through the plate.

Now, any of those bacteria that were on the surface of the meat are mixed up and spread all throughout the ground beef. When we make patties out of the ground beef, the bacteria could be on the surface or anywhere inside the patty.

These are some patties we made for a research project. Real bacteria don’t have color and you can’t see them on or in your patties.

It is easier to see the green, play-doh, bacteria mixed in with the red in my play-doh patty.

When I tore open my little play-doh patty, the students could see the green bacteria all throughout the patty.

So, when you cook patties, you should always cook them to 160 °F. USE A MEAT THERMOMETER. Make sure the thermometer is inserted into the middle of the patty.

When you order hamburgers at a restaurant, ALWAYS order them to medium or greater.

If you have other questions about food safety, I wrote a blog post about food safety in September.

A common conversation over steak dinners with meat scientists is how we order our steaks. I order my steaks cooked to medium-rare. Why, you ask? Well, there are two main types of protein in meat that affect tenderness, connective tissue (holds it all together) and myofibrillar (causes the muscle to contract). These two proteins react differently to exposure to heat. Connective tissue (collagen) protein dissolves to gelatin when it is heated, so it becomes more tender. The myofibrillar proteins harden as they are heated and become tougher. The optimum combination of collagen dissolving and myofibrillar hardening happens at about the temperature of medium-rare. Yum.

Some people don’t like the serumy (bloody) flavor associated with medium-rare and they want their steaks cooked longer (my mom). I guess that’s ok. If you like more well done steaks, I suggest you buy steaks with more marbling (USDA Choice, Prime, and Certified Angus Beef). The extra marbling protects the tenderness of those steaks when you cook them more.

Like I said, there is really no wrong answer to the question, “how would you like your steak cooked?”

However, you must cook hamburgers to medium (160°F) or greater.

We are not really talking about pink slime

What a lovely way to title a blog post! Pink slime! Wednesday night, ABC news reported a story about a product that is found in many ground beef products. They reported that a ‘whistle-blower’ USDA employee has come out telling the world about the evils of ‘Lean Finely-Textured Beef.’ This former USDA microbiologist, coined the term ‘pink slime.’ Celebrity chef, Jaime Oliver has falsely reported about this product in the past, too. He is so off-base and his approach is so theatrical, I couldn’t even bear to link to his video. 

Since the ABC report, other news agencies have picked it up and informed us that Lean Finely-Textured Beef is in school lunches and in lots of the beef in grocery stores. The videos and the story links have been lighting up my facebook and Twitter feeds for the better part of two days. 

First, what is ‘Lean Finely-Textured Beef?’

What the media is calling pink slime, we, in the industry, call “Lean Beef Trimmings” or “Lean Finely Textured Beef”. I’ve done research with the stuff, and I didn’t think it was slimy at all. This is a picture of the LBT that we used for a research project last fall.

 

It is kinda pink. News flash: meat is usually a pink or red color! It doesn’t really look like the typical ground beef in the grocery store because it is ground up much finer than that. It is also shipped frozen. It may be shipped in big frozen blocks, but we ordered it in this chipped version so we could weigh it out more easily.

How is it made?

When cattle are harvested and cut into the beef steaks and roasts that we buy at the grocery store or that restaurants buy, pieces of lean and fat are trimmed away. Some of that lean and fat can be used to make ground beef and other sausage products. But, some of it is too fatty for ground beef and sausage. There is still lean protein in the fatty parts, but, before the Lean Finely-Textured Beef process came along, there was not really an economical way to remove the lean protein from the fatty trim. So it was thrown away.

Several years ago, a company called Beef Products Inc., patented a method to remove the lean tissue from the fatty trim. That way, the lean protein is not wasted and we are getting more protein out of every animal.

So, how does it work?

They start with fatty trim that is about 80% fat and 20% lean protein. These trimmings were sampled and tested by USDA for harmful bacteria before they arrived at the plant. The trimmings are heated it to about 100°F so that the fat will soften. Then, it is spun in a big mixing bowl machine to separate the lean from the fat.

The lean is then treated with a puff of ammonia gas and the ammonia reacts with the water on the product and converts it to ammonium hydroxide. This treatment has been one of the hot-button issues for this whole process. Ammonia gas and ammonium hydroxide are not the same as the house-hold cleaner, as a certain celebrity chef wants you to believe. The gas treatment raises the pH of the meat and destroys the bacteria on the meat. (Dead bacteria can’t make your kids sick.) Essentially, the ammonium hydroxide makes the product even safer.

Ammonium hydroxide is found naturally in some foods and other foods, such as baked goods, cheeses, caramels, chocolate, gelatins and puddings, contain ammonium hydroxide. Here is a video interview with Dr. Gary Acuff from Texas A&M talking about the addition of ammonium hydroxide to lean beef trimmings.

So, it’s safe?
The final product is tested for deadly bacteria before it leaves the plant. Countless scientists agree that this product is safe and is produced using a safe process. This article lists several of those scientists and statements they made about the safety of this product. These are microbiologists from Texas A and M University, scientists from USDA, a former president of the National Consumer League, and the nation’s leading food borne illness attorney.

What products contain LBT?
When LBT is made, it contains 95% lean protein or greater. So, it is added to ground beef to increase the lean percentage. Because of its fine texture, it can only be added in a small percentage or it will affect the texture of the ground beef. ABC reported that 70% of ground beef in grocery stores contain LBT. So far, I haven’t been able to confirm or deny that number. I couldn’t find the link to cite, but I believe that McDonald’s stopped using LBT because the finely textured properties didn’t work in their beef.


Is it on the label?

No. It is 100% beef. Lean Beef Trimmings is not listed as a separate ingredient on the label.

Obviously, I am not the only person writing about this. There are several other blogs and articles to read.
The American Meat Institute has a list of questions and answers about the process. My new twitter friend, Travis Arp, a graduate student at Colorado State, has seen the product being made and writes about it in this blog post. (New additions on Monday, March 12, 2012 - pinkslimeisamyth.com and a blog entitled Common Sense Agriculture)Beef Products Inc. has issued a statement about all the recent publicity. And, of course there is the Meat Myth Crushers video. The list could go on and on.


3-28-12 amendment: Since I posted this, several more websites and articles have been posted telling the real story about Lean Finely-Textured Beef, ammonium hydroxide, and the safety of this product. I felt like I needed to add them to this post.

• A video about the misrepresentation by Jaime Oliver.
• A video about the use of ammonia in foods.
• A interview with Dr. Thomas Powell, Executive Director of the American Meat Science Association (a personal friend of mine). This is a great explanation of this product.
• A statement from the American Meat Institute President, J. Patrick Boyle.
• A blog post by agriculture advocate, Trent Loos. (One huge step backwards for mankind.)
• Several website links are available on the website beefisbeef.com.
• A heart-wrenching article by Nancy Donley, president of STOP food borne illness. Her only child, Alex, died from kidney failure after consuming hamburger contaminated E. coli O157:H7.

 

Please read or watch some of these resources and share the truth with people you know.

Here is the bottom line on my thoughts about Lean Beef Trimmings.

Yes, it is safe. It is treated to kill bacteria.

Yes, it is wholesome. It is protein, that, without this process, we would not have access to.

Yes, I would feed it to my family. I do.

Disclaimer – the temperature and the ammonium hydroxide gas treatment are specific to the Lean Finely-Textured Beef product from one company. Other, similar products are also made, using similar processes.