fibers and connective tissue are groups of fat cells, which store fat as a source of energy for the muscle fibers The qualities of meat — its texture, color, and flavor — are determined to a large extent by the arrangement and relative proportions of the muscle fibers, connective tissue, and fat tissue Muscle Tissues and Meat Texture Muscle Fibers When we look at a piece of meat, most of what we see are bundles of muscle cells, the fibers that do the moving A single fiber is very thin, around the thickness of a human hair (a tenth to a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter), but it can be as long as the whole muscle The muscle fibers are organized in bundles, the larger fibers that we can easily see and tease apart in well-cooked meat The basic texture of meat, dense and firm, comes from the mass of muscle fibers, which cooking makes denser, dryer, and tougher And their elongated arrangement accounts for the “grain” of meat Cut parallel to the bundles and you see them from the side, lined up like the logs of a cabin wall; cut across the bundles and you see just their ends It’s easier to push fiber bundles apart from each other than to break the bundles themselves, so it’s easier to chew along the direction of the fibers than across them We usually carve meat across the grain, so that we can chew with the grain Muscle fibers are small in diameter when the animal is young and its muscles little used As it grows and exercises, its muscles get stronger by enlarging — not by increasing the number of fibers, but by increasing the number of contractile protein fibrils within the individual fibers That is, the number of muscle cells stays the same, but they get thicker The more protein fibrils there are ...comes from the mass of muscle fibers, which cooking makes denser, dryer, and tougher And their elongated arrangement accounts for the “grain” of meat Cut parallel to the bundles and you see them from the side, lined... easier to chew along the direction of the fibers than across them We usually carve meat across the grain, so that we can chew with the grain Muscle fibers are small in diameter when the animal is young and its muscles little... bundles and you see them from the side, lined up like the logs of a cabin wall; cut across the bundles and you see just their ends It’s easier to push fiber bundles apart from each other than to break the bundles themselves, so it’s