Novel cooking techniques and their impact on livestock meat quality: A comprehensive review of processing, eating, nutritional, and safety quality.

Traditional meat cooking methods, such as boiling, frying, and grilling, often lead to nutrient loss, reduced flavor, and microbiological safety risks. To enhance nutritional value and meet modern consumer demands, innovative technologies such as Ultrasound-Assisted Cooking (UAC), Sous Vide (SV), Microwave Cooking (MC), and Ohmic Heating (OH) have emerged. Among these, UAC improves water retention, tenderness, and flavor while delaying spoilage. SV minimizes cooking loss, preserves the natural flavor of meat, enhances tenderness and nutritional value, and ensures safety. MC increases tenderness, allows for precise pH regulation, reduces nutrient loss, and maintains microbiological safety. OH preserves color, regulates pH, and lowers microbial risks through resistive heating. Notably, techniques such as SV and MC exhibit particular promise in achieving a balanced optimization across key quality dimensions, including processing, eating, nutritional, and safety. Consequently, these technologies serve as effective alternatives to traditional methods, providing more efficient and higher-quality cooking approaches for meat processing. This review aims to: (1) elucidate the core principles of novel cooking techniques such as SV and UAC; (2) examine the impacts of these techniques on the processing quality, eating quality, nutritional quality and safety quality of livestock meat processing, while critically assessing the limitations of current technologies regarding quality enhancement; (3) propose future research directions that include the development of intelligent cooking systems. These systems must integrate advanced sensors, high-speed connectivity, and artificial intelligence algorithms, along with computer vision technology, to achieve precise control and feedback in the cooking process, thereby facilitating its large-scale industrial application.