Beef With Marbling

High grade beef has a lot of marbling and therefore offers superior tenderness texture and delicious flavor while also bringing a higher price.

Beef with marbling. Feed and finishing may also impact marbling with grass finished cattle offering a leaner beefier flavor whereas grain finished beef are much milder. Certain breeds have higher marbling scores on average due to the way they metabolize food. Beef marbling standards bms or beef marbling standards rely on marbling to grade beef quality. Marbling is fat so it is largely determined by the diet of the animal and to a certain degree the breed of cattle.

Beef marble scores are used to rate beef. And some cattle breeds simply will not produce marbled meat no matter what they are fed how fat they get or how tender their beef is. When beef graders yes there are people who grade beef for a living are grading beef they specifically look at amount of marbling in the ribeye muscle between the 12 th and 13 th ribs. Usda s agricultural marketing service ams employs 200 highly skilled beef graders who sometimes with the help of electronic monitoring evaluate several factors that determine the grade including the amount and distribution of marbling.

Wagyu beef for example can be extremely marbled due to its genetics so much so that it s prized for that marbling. In japan up to 12 different grades exist for wagyu beef. Marbling is a measure of quality and as such the meat industry is always using meat science to make production more predictable and uniform to boost profits. The following factors affect marbling in beef.

Cattle that are raised on grain will have more marbling than grass fed beef this is fairly intuitive since you can imagine how difficult it would be to get fat by eating grass. Marble score or grades are a component of the aus meat beef quality grading system and is assessed within the ribeye muscle. Based on that one location of the cow they can then determine if the beef in the entire cow is prime choice or select.