The difficulty of standardizing the

The difficulty of standardizing the tenderness evaluation is one of the main problems related to the beef quality. Therefore, researchers have systematically attempted to determine the most accurate and repeatable method to measure shear force and sensory tenderness of cooked meat.Warner-Blatzler shear force has been the main instrumental method used to evaluate beef tenderness, being well correlated with consumertenderness ratings . However, the method of sample presentation has a significant effect on both sensory and instrumental evaluation, and ultimately, on the magnitude of the correlation coefficient . Therefore, both shear force and sensory tenderness measurements would be standardized so that data collected by different researchers would be comparable. Some of the parameters to be standardized in the shear force evaluation are related to the sample preparation, which for the most part involves cooking specifications such as temperature,method, portion size and end-point temperature, but also includes the fiber orientation anddimension of sub-sections or cores removed for testing . Of these factors, obtaining cores correctly oriented parallel to the long axis of the muscle fibers is imperative to obtain the most accurate and repeatable data , reducing the variation in shear force protocols.