A LAMB industry myth has been busted open by a recent study looking at consumer sensory testing of lamb, hogget and young mutton. It turns out the Chinese love our lamb.
This is what Murdoch University’s Professor David Pethick told delegates at this week’s Lambex conference in Albury.
He said the eating quality of Australian lamb and sheep meat as determined by American and Chinese consumers had never been tested in a controlled experiment.
Of most interest was the data from the Chinese sampling.
He said the rate of consumption of lamb and mutton across the Chinese population was three kilograms per capita.
“So they are actually lamb consumers”, he said, calling out the long-held belief in Australia that the Chinese didn;t like lamb and these figures showed their lamb consumption wasn’t far behind their annual per capita beef consumption of five kilograms.
He said the Chinese consumed beef and lamb when entertaining as a way of showing off their wealth.
For the trial, short loins and topsides were used to represent a tender cut and a tougher cut of lamb.
The trial used about 164 lambs and the same number of hoggets. The Lambs were mixed breed while the hoggets were all Merinos.
The testing group included 720 untrained consumers in each country. The grilling of the lamb in every country was done to medium, on 70 degrees.
“All the countries used the same machine (to cook the lamb). They’re called a Signage grill and cost $10,000 each,” he said.
The scoring was based on tenderness, juiciness, overall liking and flavour.
They were also required to tick from a choice of respones, including: satisfactory and they would buy it again; a pass and was okay for everyday meals; is it better than everyday; or, they didn’t like it and wouldn’t buy it.again.
He said the results showed the country of the consumer had no significant effect on whether tenderness was important (ie. they all rated tenderness equally). Also, there was only a slight variation between countries for how much they preferenced lamb over hogget, but all countries preferred lamb.
Overall, the three countries scored the lamb almost exactly the same, which demonstrated that the same eating quality factors were of equal importance regardless of country. The same result was produced for the hogget.
“All countries did work out that loin was more tender than topside – so I’ve got great faith in the human race,” Professor Pethick said.
In fact, their scores were all similar, with each country also rating the lamb higher than hogget.
One area the Chinese did differ was they scored the lamb more poorly for tenderness than the other two countries.
Going into the trial, the expectation was that the Chinese were far more sensitive to lamb and would not like it.
Professor Pethick said when looking at the number of samples where the loin received a fail, Australia totalled six per cent.
“That’s still a very high quality product,” he said.
“In China, it was three per cent. Chinese people love our friggin lamb. This is real data, this is not me making it up.”
He said there was no suggestion that there was any national reaction to strong flavour or odour.
He said these results showed big potential for lamb in China.
The trial was run by the Australian Co-operative Centre for Sheep Industry Innovation, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, China Agriculture University, Beijing, China, and Thomas Foods International, Murray Bridge, South Australia.
