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Piedmontese - The Beef you can feel Good about!

 

The "Lean Gene" Myostatin makes the difference... 

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So what makes beef tender?

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All beef producers understand that tenderness is a very important factor in customer satisfaction. The difference is how they achieve that tenderness. Some types of beef rely on intermuscular fat content, or marbling. Traditionally the beef industry has set high marbling content as a gold standard for tenderness. Unfortunately marbling is the fat that contains all of the highly saturated cholesterol we know to be a health risk to our heart.

Piedmontese Beef is different, which is what makes it the more heart healthy choice. The reason is in the myostatin gene. This gene gives the Piedmontese breed of cattle the "muscle bound" appearance for which they are known. It also reduces the cholesterol content of Piedmontese Beef. Research done by the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) in Clay Center, Nebraska, showed the myostatin gene causes this, and their paper "Beef Leaness Gene Pinpointed" was published in the Agricultural Research magazine.

Another important difference is that beef that relies on marbling for tenderness can only claim that tenderness for the prime cuts along the backbone. Cuts that come from the large arm and leg muscles lack the marbling and the tenderness of a prime rib cut. Piedmontese tenderness is found in all cuts throughout the carcass because it is the genetically determined muscle structure that makes it tender, not intermuscular fat. Do you want only a small percentage of your freezer beef to be tender, or all of it?

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