Tenderization efficiency of cucumis extract (Cucumis Trigonus Rox-b)‎compared with papain enzyme on the aged bull meat by injection method

Abstract EN

This study was carried out to develop a method for enhancing tenderness and overallqualities of Karadi tough aged bull meat (more than 5 years old) by using proteolytic extract fromcucumis fruit (Cucumis trigonus Rox-b) compared to papain enzyme.

After slaughter bull anddressing carcass, the three main muscle, longissimus dorsi (LD), semimembranosus (SM) andsupraspinatus (SS) were evaluated by injecting brine supplied with extract solutions in differentconcentrations.

(0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 % of cold cucumis extract solution and 0.02 % of Papain extractsolution and distilled water as group) at average of injection of 10 % muscle weight.

Overall, there were significant (p˂0.05) reduction of muscle pH, water holding capacity and cooking lossand significant (p˂0.05) increase in collagen solubility, nitrogen solubility in LD, SM and SSmuscle samples treated with cucumis extract compared with control and Papain enzyme.

Theincreased concentration of cucumis extract resulted in significant increase (p˂0.05) in total andmyofibrillar protein solubility with slightly increase of sarcoplasmic solubility in muscle samplesthat treated with cucumis extract compared to control and Papain enzyme.

The electrophoresispattern of muscle treated samples also revealed extensive proteolysis occurring in each muscletype.

The results of sensory evaluation indicated that the tenderness, juiciness and overallacceptability of all treated muscle samples significantly (p<0.05) improved compared withcontrol.

In our experiment, generally cucumis extract tended to be more effective than papainextract for most of the studied traits.

There for it can be summarized that cucumis extract is oneof the best alternative source of proteolytic enzymes for the effective tenderizing of meat.