DEFROSTING MEAT.

Northern Advocate, 3 December 1923, Page 3

DEFROSTING MEAT.

EXPERIMENTS IN LONDON. Those interested in the improved marketing of frozen meat in Great Britain, which, after all, remains as before the biggest meat market of the world, have had their attention drawn from time to time to sundry defrosting processes, designed to put meat on the retailer's counter and eventually into the housewife's oven in a state of excellence more nearly approaching the home-killed article. Time has not carried us far in this direction, and this is probably because the perfect defrosting system, if it were ever discovered, cannot be applied with uniform market satisfaction in the various classes of business. This is to say, defrosting, while it might suit a multiple meat shop owing company, which could thus issue improved supplies to its branches from a central establishment, does not altogether suit the needs of the more casual purchase and distribution from salesmen's quarters in our wholesale markets, and many have repeatedly said that defrosted meat, although it might be excellent, is worth a fraction per lb. less in the wholesale stage because their retail customers have appreciated the remaining charge of frost in the meat, enabling them to carry it a distance and keep it so much longer.

However, defrosting is undoubtedly the key to the ultimate greater palatability of frozen meat, and although recently the trials of the Cooper-Ray-son process, under the auspices of the Australian Government in London, proved such a fiasco, the last word has not yet been heard of defrosting as a general idea. Not long after those unsuccessful experiments there arrives in London a system, also from Australia, which is regarded as definitely more promising than its predecessors. This is the system ,invented some time ago by Mr .A. V. Alcock, a Melbourne electrical engineer, and it consists of passing ordinary alternating electric current through a a carcase or quarter, thereby deducing it to an unfrosted condition in from five to eight hours in the case of mutton and lamb, and from 16 to 24 hours in the case of a beef quarter. The process is simplicity itself, consuming in the case of a beef quarter only two and a quarter units :>f electricity or less, and the operation being conducted in'any ordinary room or in the open ai>\ find from the con-

nection any electric light- wire using alternating current. Naturally, this simple system has not been arrived at without a good deal of research on the part of the inventor. But its extreme simplicity as it is now developed may commend it to many who would otherwise not be so inclined to go in for defrosting.

As will probnblv ho knowtn, rerouted successful tests of this Alcock-W agstafF process have been made in Australia, and it wis because of an inquiry from the American Government that a demonstration was Arranged last week in London, under the scrutiny of U.S.A. Embassy officials. The results of this hastily arranged ti-st are said to have been satisfactory, and other trials will probably be made before the inventor leaves again for Australia, which he is doing shortly. The process is said to have « remarkable effect in producing a fine fresh colour in the meat treated.