The impact of sous vide braising on the sensory characteristics and heterocyclic amines contents of braised chicken

Abstract

Braising is the key process in braised chicken production. However, traditional braising also causes quality deterioration and heterocyclic amines (HAs) formation due to over-cooking. In this study, the impact of sous vide braising (SVB) on the sensory characteristics and HAs contents were investigated. The results indicated that SVB significantly enhanced the water content, reduced the cooking loss and impacted the water distribution, while only slightly affected the color and texture. Moreover, SVB faintly affected the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) composition. The differences mainly came from the contents of 1-pentanol, heptanal (monomer), octanal (monomer), n-nonanal (monomer), pentanal (dimer) and three unknown VOCs. While maintaining the traditional sensory qualities, SVB1 samples (75 °C 2 h) had lower total HAs content (4.50 ± 0.64 ng/g), which was 15.6% lower than control (5.33 ± 0.43 ng/g). However, the total HAs contents in SVB3 (65 °C 3 h, 7.61 ± 0.76 ng/g) and SVB4 (65 °C 4 h, 9.57 ± 0.74 ng/g) samples were significantly higher. The result indicated that even lower braising temperature is not conducive to HAs generation, SVB still cannot effectively reduce the HAs residual contents with the extending duration. Therefore, how to reduce the HAs residual contents in sauce braised meat products effectively remains to be studied.