Or at least there wasn't. A pair of Danish researchers decided to settle the question the way they settle most questions at work: by scanning it.
A Hospital Trick Applied to Dinner
The study came out of Aalborg, from a collaboration between Dr Phillip Kaasgaard Sperling at Aalborg University Hospital and Gustav Normann, a medical student at Aalborg University. It was published in Ugeskrift for Læger, the Danish Medical Journal, in December 2024.
The idea started as a conversation between two people who spend most of their working day reading ultrasound images. They had come across earlier research linking MRI scanning to high fluid content in a pork roast and a dry result after cooking. Interesting finding. Completely useless in a supermarket. So the obvious follow-up was whether the same thing could be spotted with something that fits in a coat pocket.
They bought three roasts at three different quality levels and scanned each one with a handheld probe. The images were then run through software that separates the signal into fat, fluid, and connective tissue. Only then were the roasts cooked and served to 40 students, who scored each one on flavour, moistness, and texture without knowing which was which.
The scans got it right. The roast with the most free fluid was rated the driest and finished last on taste. Normann's takeaway was refreshingly direct: if you own an ultrasound scanner, use it.
The Part That Sounds Backwards
Here is where most people stop and reread the sentence. More liquid in the raw meat should mean a juicier roast, surely?
It doesn't, and the reason is worth understanding because it explains almost every disappointing roast you have ever cooked.
Lean muscle is roughly three-quarters water. What matters isn't how much water is in there, but how tightly the muscle proteins grip it. Meat scientists call this water-holding capacity. When it's good, the moisture stays locked inside the protein structure while the meat cooks. When it's poor, the water is loose in the tissue, and loose water is exactly what an ultrasound probe picks up as free fluid.
In the oven, that same loose water simply leaves. Industry benchmarks treat drip loss above 5 percent and cooking loss above 25 percent as a genuine quality problem, and in badly affected pork, fluid loss can exceed 7 percent before the meat ever sees heat.
The worst version of this has a name: PSE pork, short for pale, soft and exudative. It happens when pH drops too quickly after slaughter while the carcass is still warm, which denatures the very proteins responsible for binding water. In the packet, it looks plump and appealing. In the pan, it goes tough and dry. Estimates suggest a meaningful share of fresh pork production is affected, and the cost to the industry has been put in the tens of millions of dollars a year in the US alone.
So the scanner isn't measuring juiciness at all. It's measuring the water that was always going to escape.
Why Not Just Use an MRI?
Because you cannot wheel one around Tesco, Normann's own description of MRI was that it's heavy, absurdly expensive, and not remotely accessible. Ultrasound is cheap by comparison, quick, and for someone trained to read it, legible in a few seconds.
That accessibility is really the whole point of the study. It takes a finding that used to require a hospital basement and moves it into one hand.
The Price Barrier Is Falling Fast
At the time of the study, the researchers put the cost of a scanner at around 80,000 Danish kroner, roughly £9,000, and pointed out that the same class of device had cost about three times that only a few years earlier.
That curve has kept bending. Handheld point-of-care ultrasound probes that plug into a phone or tablet now start somewhere around 2,500 US dollars, with the wider handheld market running from about 2,000 to 9,000 depending on brand and probe configuration. Refurbished units go for less again. Most subscription-based models add a few hundred dollars a year for cloud storage and software, putting realistic five-year ownership somewhere between $3,200 and $6,600.
For context, the point-of-care ultrasound market was worth around 4.5 billion dollars in 2025 and is growing at roughly 7 percent a year. Medical students buying their own probes is now a recognised slice of that market, which is, more or less, how this study came to exist.
Still not a stocking filler. But no longer science fiction either.
Could Restaurants Actually Use This?
Normann thinks fine dining is the likeliest first stop, and the logic holds up. Ingredient costs are high, tolerance for a bad batch is low, and a kitchen buying whole primals has far more riding on the decision than a family buying one roast.
He also flagged the honest limitation. Scanning is not the hard part. Interpreting what you're looking at is. A probe in untrained hands produces a grey smear, not a purchasing decision. Any real kitchen use would depend on trained staff or software that handles classification automatically, and automated tissue classification is where imaging AI has been moving fastest.
A Different Kind of Ultrasound: When Chefs Use It Directly on the Food
Everything above is diagnostic ultrasound: the scanner reads the meat but never touches it. A separate, much newer use of the same underlying technology does the opposite. Instead of imaging the food, it works on the food. Sonication, as it's known in culinary circles, drives ultrasonic waves directly into liquids and tissue to create rapid, controlled cavitation. The same forceful micro-bubbling is now finding its way into professional and home kitchens for extraction, tenderising and fermentation.
This is the territory the emerging Ultrasonic Chef™ movement is built around. Where Normann's scanner tells you which roast to buy, ultrasonic food processing goes a step further. It actively changes what's happening inside the meat: breaking down connective tissue to tenderise tougher cuts, or accelerating fermentation and curing by speeding up the microbial and enzymatic activity that would otherwise take days or weeks.
Copenhagen Culinary Center, through its Ultrasonic Culinary Academy, runs what it describes as the first standalone masterclasses dedicated to Ultrasonic Cooking and Fermentation, teaching chefs and home cooks how to apply sonication to everything from meat tenderising to accelerated ferments. It's a genuinely different discipline from the diagnostic scanning behind this study. Still, the two techniques share a starting point: sound waves, applied with enough precision, can tell you something about food that your eyes alone can't.
How to Pick a Good Roast Without Any of This
For everyone not carrying medical equipment through the meat aisle, the underlying science still gives you something to work with. You're looking for signs that the meat is holding onto its water rather than shedding it.
• Look at the tray, not the meat. A pool of liquid underneath is drip loss moisture the muscle has already failed to hold. Pick the drier packet.
• Be wary of pork that looks very pale and very wet. That combination is the visual signature of poor water-holding capacity. You want a normal pinkish-red colour and a firm surface.
• Give it a press if the packaging allows. Firm is good. Soft and floppy suggests weak protein structure underneath.
• Choose never-frozen where you can. Freezing and thawing can substantially increase drip loss, because ice crystals physically rupture the structure that holds water in place.
• Check the marbling and the fat cap. Intramuscular fat contributes to perceived juiciness regardless of water content, and an even fat layer is also what gives you decent crackling.
• Salt the skin hours ahead. Pulling surface moisture out of the rind well before roasting is the difference between crisp crackling and something closer to leather.
And What About the Christmas Duck?
Untested, unfortunately. There's a practical obstacle too. Pigs are anatomically close enough to humans that decades of medical ultrasound and MRI research transfer reasonably well when you're trying to identify tissue types. Ducks are not, so the existing evidence base doesn't carry across nearly as neatly.
One last clarification the researchers were keen to make, and it seems only fair to pass it on: the whole thing was done in their own time. No patient waited while 40 students ranked three roasts.
The Short Version
Three roasts and 40 tasters is a light-hearted holiday paper, not a landmark trial, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. But the mechanism underneath it is solid, well documented, and genuinely useful. Wet-looking pork is not juicy pork. It's pork that has already started giving up its water, and the oven will finish the job.
You probably won't be scanning your Christmas dinner this year. You can absolutely start reading the tray.....LEARN MORE
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