Application Studies / Chicken - Multiple Methods of Testing Whole & Shredded Chicken

Chicken - Multiple Methods of Testing Whole & Shredded Chicken

Industry:

Food

Meat

Attributes measured:

hardness

firmness

shear strength

toughness

Background

The firmness and toughness of poultry meat are highly important textural attributes for consumers. The textural characteristics of whole muscle meat can be highly variable because of differences in testing presentation, sample provenance, testing location on muscle group, subtle cooking differences between products, and even differences between the birds themselves, etc. Many of these same problems also show up when evaluating the texture of diced and shredded poultry. This application study presents several methods for testing the firmness and toughness of whole chicken breast and shredded chicken breast. Testing was performed with Stable Micro System’s TA.XTPlus and the accompanying Exponent software. Poultry breeding, animal feed, ingredient, and processing companies can choose between the proposed methods and deploy the one which most closely evaluate the targeted tenderness of their products.