Allow us to introduce you to a new ingredient messing with your dinner: Transglutaminase is an enzyme made by the fermentation of bacteria, and it enables industrial meat producers and purveyors to take cheap chunks of beef, "glue" them together, and create what looks like a pricey cut of meat. Unfortunately, this meat mishmash is not uncommon in the food service industry.
Here's how it works, according to Salon:
By liberally dusting meat pieces with transglutaminase powder, squishing them into filet mignon-shaped molds, adding a bit of pressure to bond the pieces and chilling them -- voila, four-bucks-a-pound stew meat looks like a $25-a-pound filet mignon!
The meat industry lobbying group says that meat treated with transglutaminase powder has it listed as an ingredient on the label, and is stamped with a "formed" or "reformed" sticker. However, since most expensive cuts of meat are sold in restaurants, the consumer never has the luxury to see this label.
Read More: What's Really In Your Steak? at Salon
Related: Quick Tip: How To Tell When Your Steak is Done
(Image: Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock)
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This has been worked over in various media lately.. it's not really an issue. If you're a paying a reasonable price for fillet mignon in a good restaurant there's no chance it's something else "reformed"
If you're paying 1.99/lb for mystery meat you might be getting what you pay for.
High end restaurants that are using transglutaminase are using it to do things like bond chicken skin or bacon to the outside of other delicious things and they're not only aware of the contamination risk surrounding its use but they're the ones that are most vocal about using it responsibly.
if you take chunks of cheap meat and use transglutaminase (TGA) to bind them, you'll get a cheap reformed meat
if you take chunks of an expensive meat, such as filet mignon, and use TGA to bind them, you'll get a much better product.
in no way can the industry take a cheap chunk of meat and transform it into a "pricey cut".
the whole idea behind using TGA is to use the meat chunks that are a by-product in the trimming process, in which the meat gets its rounded shape. lots of perfectly good meat are waisted or otherwise processed into cheaper products solely by the reason of getting a perfectly round filet mignon.
i pretty much perfer the industry to be more efficient and use meat wisely than to just get rid of such a highly nutritional food, in a world where so many have no meat (or anything, for that matter) to eat.
and please - TGA by no means is a NEW additive. It has GRAS status in the USA since 1999 and is approved by the USDA for use in meat products since 2001.
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/oppde/rdad/FRPubs/01-016DF.htm
@cristaleo I'd much rather see those scraps used as they are than reformed into a 'steak'. There are plenty of dishes that can beautifully use small pieces of meat.
Ugh. Add this to the growing list of reasons why I'm going to become a vegetarian again.
@foodefafa ok, i get your point - but i should remember that most meat products are formed in some way (just think of a nugget or hamburguer, for instance).
would people be more willing to buy and use meat scraps or meat steaks? I don't know, but it seems that a steak is a more popular product.
@cristaleo - typically small scraps of meat (too small for anything else) are used to make hamburger. I don't see how this reformed stuff is any more efficient use of the animal.