Lean beef

Cattle, and the meat they gave

Beef is the meat of domestic cattle, and cattle are two animals under one name. The taurine cattle, Bos taurus, were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent; the humped zebu or indicine cattle, Bos indicus (treated by geneticists as Bos taurus indicus), come from a separate domestication in the Indus valley. The split between the two is the largest source of variation in the genomes of cattle today. A third group, the African taurines, carry a large share of ancestry from wild African aurochs, the wild ancestor of cattle. Early farmers took their herds with them as they spread, and the breeds of the world are a record of those journeys: Shorthorn cattle shaped many European breeds, Iberian and Italian cattle carry African taurine ancestry, and the Criollo cattle of the Americas came from Iberia, with indicine blood added later in the Americas.

Beef is now a major commodity. FAOSTAT records 69.7 million tonnes of cattle meat in 2024, up from 27.7 million tonnes in 1961, with the United States producing 12.3 million tonnes, Brazil 10.2 million, China 7.0 million, Argentina 3.2 million and Australia 2.6 million. What a cook buys as lean beef is a small part of that carcass: the trimmed muscle from the large cuts, with the fat and sinew taken away.

Beef in the salami tradition

Dry sausage is a pork tradition with a beef side. In the hills behind Genoa, the salame di Sant’Olcese is made from coarsely ground pork and beef in equal proportions and aged for two to three months. It was first produced at Orero, which belonged to Sant’Olcese until 1877, and industrial production began in the early nineteenth century. The Parodi salumificio at Sant’Olcese traces its history to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Luigi Parodi, born in 1830, began making the salami; his son Federico founded the present business in 1908, and the firm works with pork and beef and also sells an all-pork variant.

The Genoa-style formula behind this ingredient is 400 grams of lean pork, 400 grams of lean beef and 200 grams of pork back fat to the kilogram, a 40/40/20 split in which the beef is half of the lean meat. Beef also anchors entirely different sausage traditions: all-beef dry sausages and the beef soujouk are made with beef as the only lean meat and beef fat or the fat of the zebu hump as the fat.

In the mix beef is the second lean meat: its muscle proteins bind the sausage as pork’s do, and it brings little fat of its own, so the maker sets the fat separately with pork back fat. The beef in the Genoa-style recipe is ground through a finer plate than the pork and fat, 3 or 4.5 millimetres against 10, with the sinew and silver skin trimmed away first, so the beef ends up as the fine part of a coarse salami.

What lean means in the butcher’s sense

Lean beef is cattle muscle with most of its fat trimmed away. The word names a condition, not a cut: round, a trimmed shoulder or the lean part of a carcass can all be lean. Meat processors work with practical grades. Meat I is fairly uniform pieces trimmed of connective tissue with about 8 percent visible fatty tissue, cut from the large primal cuts, mostly of the hindquarter. Meat II is irregular pieces partly trimmed of connective tissue with about 15 percent visible fat, mostly from the forequarter. Lean trimmings, small irregular pieces with about 25 percent fatty and connective tissue, and fatty trimmings, with about 50 percent, come after them. Beef for a recipe that asks for lean beef is, in these terms, something near Meat I or Meat II.

A beef carcass is divided into large primal cuts. The forequarter yields the chuck, shank, brisket, plate and rib, and the hindquarter the flank, loin and round. The hindquarter holds more of the tender cuts and so is in greater demand and returns higher prices. Poor-quality meat is normally kept for further processing, while thicker-fleshed, higher-quality carcasses go to the shop as steaks and roasts. Good beef is bright cherry-red, firm to the touch and fine in texture, with a little marbling; a cut for sausage is taken from the same carcass but chosen for its lean content.

Muscle, connective tissue and fat

Meat is mostly three soft tissues of the carcass: muscle, mainly skeletal and between 30 and 65 percent of the carcass, fatty tissue, between 10 and 45 percent, and connective tissue. The structural unit of muscle is the fibre, a long cell that makes up 72 to 92 percent of the muscle’s volume and is built from bundles of myofibrils. The filaments inside them consist almost wholly of two proteins, actin (the thin filament, 20 to 25 percent) and myosin (the thick filament, 50 to 55 percent). Although they make up only about 7 percent of the weight of the muscle, they largely decide one of the most important properties of meat in processing: its ability to hold water and to bind added water.

Connective tissue runs through everything, from tendons to the sheaths around muscle bundles. Its fibres are collagen, reticulin and elastin, and collagen makes up 20 to 25 percent of the total protein and has the main, negative, influence on tenderness. That is why a recipe asks for the sinew and the silver skin, the thin tough membrane on the surface of many cuts, to be cut away: they do not mince into a tender bite. Fat sits between the bundles of a muscle (intramuscular), in the spaces between muscles (intermuscular) and under the skin. Lean beef, in practice, is muscle from which the outer and intermuscular fat has been trimmed, leaving the fine intramuscular fat that cannot be separated.

What the numbers look like

Fat takes the place of water in beef. Raw top round roast, boneless, separable lean only and trimmed of fat, is 73.3 grams of water, 23.7 grams of protein and 2.41 grams of fat per 100 grams, with 123 kilocalories, 63 milligrams of cholesterol, 2.34 milligrams of iron, 3.54 milligrams of zinc and 1.62 micrograms of vitamin B12. Raw ground beef sold as 95 percent lean is 73.2 grams of water, 21.4 grams of protein and 5.0 grams of fat; the same raw product sold as 80 percent lean is 61.9 grams of water, 17.2 grams of protein and 20.0 grams of fat. Each step up in fat is a step down in water and protein. Beef contains no carbohydrate to speak of.

The raw materials of sausage show the same pattern. Meat I contains about 71 percent water, 10 percent fat and 19 percent protein; Meat II 63 percent water, 20 percent fat and 17 percent protein; lean trimmings 53 percent water, 33 percent fat and 12 percent protein. Pork back fat is 8 percent water and 90 percent fat, and external beef fat is 27 percent water and 67 percent fat. The proportions matter in a sausage because the water and protein of the lean meat carry the binding, the acidification and the drying, while the fat gives richness and a soft slice.

What lean beef does in a fermented sausage

In a dry sausage the meat is the substrate. A dry sausage is coarsely chopped, depends on bacterial fermentation and is never cooked; in general it is two-thirds meat and one-third fatty tissue, with curing agents and spices added. Salt, at 28 to 37 grams per kilogram, keeps down many unwanted aerobic bacteria, favours salt-tolerant ones and extracts the salt-soluble proteins, actin and myosin among them, which form a protein gel that binds the pieces and gives the finished sausage its sliceability. Sugar, most commonly dextrose at 8 to 10 grams per kilogram, speeds acidification by lactic acid bacteria, and the pH usually falls to between 4.8 and 5.4. Nitrite is indispensable for the cured colour, and low pH, low water and high salt together extend the shelf-life of a product that is never cooked.

The raw meat has to be in good condition to begin with. Beef for dry sausage should start at pH 6.0 or lower (pork at 5.8 or lower), be well chilled at -1 to 0°C or frozen, with fat colder still. Soft trimmings are not used. Frozen meat is thawed for 48 hours on slanting racks so that the drip runs off, and meat and fat are held at -2 to 5°C during chopping so that fat does not smear on the knives and the filler. Smeared fat coats the inside of the casing, lowers its porosity and makes smoking, drying and ripening harder.

Where beef is the principal meat, a separate fat is added to it. A dry beef sausage in the standard composition table is 74 percent beef of first and second quality with 10.5 percent external beef fat and 10 percent zebu hump fat; a beef soujouk is 86 percent beef with 5 percent each of external fat and hump. A salami in the same table is 67 percent pork with 28 percent pork back fat. In every case the lean beef is the muscle and the fat is chosen on its own.

Labels and legal definitions

In the United States, a meat product may be called lean on its label when it contains less than 10 grams of fat, 4.5 grams or less of saturated fat and less than 95 milligrams of cholesterol per 100 grams, and extra lean when it contains less than 5 grams of fat, less than 2 grams of saturated fat and less than 95 milligrams of cholesterol per 100 grams. Ground or chopped beef may not contain more than 30 percent fat and may not contain added water, phosphates, binders or extenders, and a package of ground beef may carry a lean-percentage statement provided a fat-percentage statement appears with it. These are labelling and standard-of-identity rules for products sold to consumers; they do not say how much fat a sausage maker should leave in a raw mix, and a butcher’s lean on a cut is not covered by them.

Choosing, keeping and handling beef

For sausage, choose beef from a source that can say what the meat is: pieces of uniform size and shape, trimmed of sinew and most visible fat, firm to the touch and a bright, even red. Colour is an ordinary guide to freshness and quality; it does not establish safety. Meat from an animal that was exhausted or stressed before slaughter can be dark, firm and dry, a condition called DFD, found in beef and pork. It holds water well but spoils very quickly because its high pH and dry surface favour bacterial growth.

Cold is the second most important requirement after cleanliness. Lean beef stored at 0°C reaches the slime stage after 8 days when the starting bacterial count is 100,000 organisms per square centimetre, 10 days at 10,000, 13 days at 1,000, 15 days at 100 and 18 days at 10. Storage temperature matters as much: slime develops after about 10 days at 0°C, 7 at 1°C, 4 at 3°C, 3 at 5°C, 2 at 10°C and 1 at 16°C. Meat spoils on the surface first, with off-odours at around a million bacteria per square centimetre and slime at a hundred million, and the spoilage bacteria that grow at refrigerator temperatures are mainly aerobic Pseudomonas species. The bacteria that cause food poisoning grow best at warmer temperatures, so keeping meat below 10°C offers good protection; under ideal conditions they can double every 20 minutes, and a single cell becomes a million in under seven hours.

Vacuum packaging gives an oxygen-free atmosphere and can extend the refrigerated shelf-life of a primal cut by as much as two or three months. Spoilage bacteria that need oxygen grow on the surface of meat, and minced meat exposes far more surface than a joint. Beef is not among the major food allergens in US law, which are milk, egg, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, wheat, peanuts, soybeans and sesame.

Open points

The breed, cut and origin of the beef in the Genoa-style recipe are not recorded, and the date when beef first entered Ligurian salami is not documented; the earliest evidence is of nineteenth-century production at Sant’Olcese.