Impact of cooking method on properties of beef and plant-based burgers: Appearance, texture, thermal properties, and shrinkage

Abstract

Consumers are increasingly adopting plant-based diets because of environmental, health, and animal welfare concerns. Ideally, the cooking behavior of plant-based meat analogs should accurately mimic that of real meat products so consumers can easily adopt them. In the current study, we characterized the impact of different cooking procedures (pan frying, air frying, and oven baking) on the physicochemical properties of beef and plant-based patties. We examined the influence of cooking temperature and time on the appearance, texture, cooking loss, and shrinkage of the two kinds of product. Moreover, the thermal properties of the beef and plant-based burgers were characterized using thermogravimetric and differential scanning calorimetric analysis to provide insights in the key temperatures where molecular changes occurred during cooking. A significant difference was observed in the physicochemical attributes of beef and plant-based patties but cooking method did not have a major influence on their final properties. After cooking, the plant-based patties had a higher water holding capacity, exhibited less shrinkage, and were softer (lower hardness, cohesiveness, springiness, resilience, and chewiness) than beef patties. However, thermal analysis suggested they exhibited a quite similar mass loss during cooking. Our results demonstrate important differences between the cookability of beef and plant-based patties, which highlights the need for further research on the physiochemical basis of the properties of plant-based foods that more accurately simulate the behavior of real meat products. • Three common cooking methods (pan frying, air frying, and oven baking) were used. • Impacts of cooking temperature/time were investigated. • Cooked PB patties had a higher water holding capacity, less shrinkage, and were softer than beef ones. • Cooking method did not have a major influence on patties' final properties. • Thermal analysis suggested PB and beef patties have similar mass loss during a cooking.