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Guilt-Free Hamburgers Become a Reality
AUBURN, Ala.—Summer cookout fans can now picnic with a clean conscience on sugarless soft drinks, sodium-free chips, cholesterol-free cheeses and soon guilt-free hamburgers.
If this sounds too good to be true, just look in the laboratory of Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station meat science researcher Dale Huffman who contends that ground beef can be both low in fat and calories and high in flavor and juiciness.
"Americans consume about seven billion pounds of ground beef a year and ground beef products constitute about 43 percent of the beef consumed in the United States," said Huffman, an Auburn University professor of meat science.
"This ground beef may contain as much as 30 percent fat and ground beef used in the fast food industry contains an average of 22 percent fat," he added. "But health conscious consumers want to eat foods that have less fat and calories."
According to Huffman, ground beef must comply with consumer demands in order to retain its popularity. Yet this idea has received only limited attention from researchers. "Little scientific work has been done to develop low-fat ground beef patties. The perception is `Anybody can make ground beef patties,'" Huffman explained.
Since the fat content of ground beef directly influences its flavor and juiciness, the development of a low-fat, high-flavor hamburger is actually a highly complicated task. And, before Huffman and his research associates could tackle the task, they had to find out how discriminating consumers can be.
Initial consumer studies showed that ground beef patties containing 15 to 20 percent fat possessed optimum sensory characteristics, such as flavor, tenderness, juiciness, and beef flavor intensity. These studies also found that consumers can detect differences in fat levels of as little as five percent and that ground beef patties containing less than 10 percent fat were unacceptably dry and bland.
Based on these results, Huffman's research team began to develop a ground beef product that contained less than 10 percent fat but still tasted good.
"We screened a lot of commonly used additives now utilized in the food industry to enhance the flavor and texture of foods," he explained. These products were added to ground beef containing less than 10 percent fat and tested by consumer panels.
A perfect combination of low levels of flavor and texture enhancers (hydrolyzed vegetable protein and carrageenan) and salt has resulted in a low-fat hamburger that has fewer calories than the typical burger but is sufficiently flavorful and succulent.
Huffman noted that these low-fat hamburgers will probably cost more than their fattier counterparts because more lean meat, the expensive component of ground beef, is used. But the health benefits of this product should outweigh the added cost.
These burgers haven't hit the butcher shop but they are receiving a great deal of attention from fast food restaurant companies anxious to give their customers delicious lean burgers. And Huffman's team is now working on lowering the fat content of other meat products.
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