The paper describes two ways of potential quality enhancement of cooked meat cooled by vacuum cooling. The first process was based on vacuum cooling of cooked meat together with hot sauce, and the results indicated that this process was not effective enough to uniformly distribute the flavour and taste substances from the sauce into the centre of meat pieces. Therefore, the second process was designed. The raw meat was ripened for three days in special brine, which was the basic component of sauces (the brine composed of vegetables and spice was then used for preparing the sauces). The meat was then cooked and vacuum cooled in this brine. With this second process, the quality parameters such as flavour and taste of the product had been substantially increased. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.