In the production of cooked meats, rapid cooling is required to cool the meats immediately after the cooking process is finished in order to minimise the growth of surviving organisms. Traditional air blast, water immersion or slow air cooling cannot achieve the required rapid cooling effect for large cooked meats. Vacuum cooling has shown its high cooling efficiency for cooked meats. In this study, vacuum cooling is used to cool large block joints of cooked meats, which have abundant of water and porosity. A mathematical model of simultaneous transient heat and mass transfer with inner heat and mass generation is developed for analysing the performance of vacuum cooling cooked meats. The variable physical properties of cooked meats during cooling process were incorporated into the model. The predictions from the model are compared with the experimental results with good agreement. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.