Tirat Tzvi Toast-Ready Cold-Cut/Lunch Meat

After recently adding a line of sliced lunch-meats, cut in half, making it easier to prepare a half pita and cold-cut sandwich. Tirat Tzvi is now selling a lunch meat (cold-cut) for toasted sandwiches. I guess their thinking is, if you didn’t send the kids to school with the half pita version, you can serve them a toasted lunch-meat sandwich when they get home.

They advertise that the meat will remain moist and juicy even after being heated, between the bread, for 2 minutes in a sandwich-maker. Tirat Tzvi said they used a unique new technology to make the cold-cuts toast-ready. They claim, that this new technology also increases the aroma and taste as the meat is heated. 

You have 3 options: Smoked Salami, Grilled Turkey or Smoked Beef Shoulder. They all have 4% goose fat added which, I assume, is intended to gives it the extra moistness and prevent the meat from drying up when toasted.

I tried the Beef Shoulder.

I found it funny that they give you clear instructions how to prepare a toasted sandwich or a non-toasted sandwich. I'm guessing someone at the Kibbutz has a sense of humor :) or, maybe they just didn’t think anyone would actually read the entire back label of the package. Well I did!

So I followed their instructions, I actually made a toasted and non-toasted sandwich in order to do a comparison test. The lunch-meat did remain moist even after being in the sandwich-maker for more than the suggested 2 minutes.

For a beef shoulder lunch-meat sandwich it was tasty.

I actually preferred it (cold or hot) to the classic beef shoulder lunch-meat they sell. To me their original beef shoulder was very rubbery, it was a thicker slice of meat and I didn’t care for its texture or taste. As a comparison I toasted that one too. Lo and behold, it came out just as moist as the new version. (So-much for the "new technology" they claimed to have used.) The classic beef shoulder was actually a little bit better in a toasted sandwich than eating it cold, yet it remained somewhat rubbery even when it was toasted. For me, either hot or cold the toast-ready version tasted better.

This new beef shoulder lunch-meat does have 5% fat as opposed to 2% fat in the original version. That must be why I thought it tasted better and was not rubbery.

Another thing I learned, by reading the whole label, is that both of them have MSG along with many other artificial ingredients. After looking at other brands, I found that this is the case with many other lunch-meat /cold-cuts as well.   

Bottom Line: Although the original shoulder beef, when toasted, stayed just as moist, making this toast-ready version seem like a gimmick, the bottom line is, it actually tasted better to me than the original.

300 gram package -27.99 NIS

Kosher Meat: Rabbi David Verner, Chadera

Disclaimer: All items were purchased by me.  No one is paying me for this review. All opinions are my own.