Colloidal study on the texture of sous vide (SV)-processed Tibetan chicken breast with human-machine collaborated electromyography analysis

Abstract

Sous Vide (SV) is a potential meat thermal processing technology. However, the texture evolution of SV processed meat is not easy to understand due to the complex hierarchical structure of meat. In our research, a two-level meat colloidal model was carried out to analyze the texture of SV-processed Tibetan chicken breast. Moreover, electromyography analysis was used to collaborate the texture results between human sensory evaluation and machine detection. Although the denaturation and dehydration of sub-continuous phase cytoskeletal proteins are unavoidable even under 55 °C at 1 h or 65 °C at 0.5 h heating, the main-continuous phase collagen can achieve slow denaturation and sufficient conversion to gelatin if SV is applied. Different from collagen under high-temperature processing, gelatin does not exert shrinkage stress to the sub-continuous phase upon SV. Moreover, insignificant lateral contraction was revealed by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Thus, limited water migration and minimized cooking loss were achieved because of the integrity of the colloid system upon SV. Furthermore, physical properties proved the tenderization effect of SV. Thus, our results showed that the colloidal model combined with an electromyography study was useful in revealing the textual detail of pure meat or imitation meat.