The outcome of the present study indicates a promising potential to
tenderise beef SM muscles using pulse electric field treatment (PEF)
which can achieve a 21.6% reduction in the shear force. However, the
opposite effect was observed in beef LL muscles which tended to get
tougher with increasing treatment frequency. This was supported by
the western analysis which showed an increase in protein degradation
in only some of the samples and that the most prominent degradation
was found with the lowest frequency (20 Hz) treatment. The two
muscles behave differently towards PEF treatment not only in the
shear force measurement, but also in the water holding capacity of the
muscle.Within SMPEF treated samples, cooking loss tended to decrease
with ageing and purge loss was significantly increased with PEF treatment
whereas cooking loss in LL muscle increased with PEF treatment
and no difference was found in purge loss. Therefore the outcome of
the present study still indicates a promising potential to tenderise
meat using PEF provided that each muscle type is treated with the
optimum PEF treatment intensity.