Tenderness is a quality of meat gauging how easily it is chewed or cut.
Tenderness is perhaps the most important of all factors impacting meat eating quality, with others being flavor, juiciness, and succulence.
[2] Tenderness is a quality complex to obtain and gauge, and it depends on a number of factors.
[1] In order to obtain a tender meat, there is a complex interplay between the animal's pasture, age, species, breed, protein intake, calcium status, stress before and at killing, and how the meat is treated after slaughter.
[3] Cooking causes melting of the fat, spreading it throughout the meat and increasing the tenderness of the final product.