Sensory Texture and Mastication Physics of Multi-Phase Meat Products

Abstract

Food products often consist of several phases. Comminuted meat products, for example, are multiphase systems consisting of structured meat particles and unstructured batter-like substance. To develop and understand the processing of these products, it is important to understand the sensory and mechanical perception principles. To this end, two-phase food prototypes consisting of mixtures of ground beef and beef batter were prepared and subjected to sensory, texture, and oral processing analysis. The oral processing analysis focused on the biomechanical data of the chewing process, namely the kinematics of jaw movement and electromyographic activity. The ground meat served as the anisotropic phase and the meat dough as the isotropic phase. A significant increase in muscle activity, duration per bite, and occlusion time with increasing proportion of fibrous particles was demonstrated (p < 0.05). In contrast, a higher proportion of isotropic substance resulted in significantly higher amplitudes of jaw movement and faster jaw kinetics (p < 0.05). In mixed regimes, the system responded mainly according to the dominant phase, with sensory or mechanical response changing at a critical point. In combination with texture and sensory data, a holistic characterization of the food models could be performed.