ABSTRACT
The objective of this study was to determine how and to what extent several culinary practices (i.e. household cooking methods), each applied to the beef muscle deemed most suitable (boiling to infraspinatus, broiling to longissimus lumborum, oven-roasting and microwaving to semitendinosus), could induce significant changes in: lipid and cholesterol contents, fatty acid composition and contents, their true and apparent retention values, and some indices of lipid oxidation. Most nutrients increased their concentration as a consequence of moisture loss through cooking, whilst no substantial variation was induced in fatty acid composition. Nevertheless, each cooking method had its own distinctive heat processing parameters, which interacted with the characteristics peculiar to the pertaining muscle, leading to markedly different evaporative and drip losses, significantly different true retention values for cholesterol and the sum of polyunsaturated fatty acids, distinct responses as to lipid oxidation liability. The selected culinary practices seemed to be able to interact with the composition of the selected muscles, up to the point that pro-oxidant conditions were in some way counteracted by antioxidant effects.