INFLUENCE OF FREEZING ON TEXTURE OF BROILER POULTRY MEAT

M.M. Ciobanu, M. Munteanu, Cecilia Pop, P.C. Boişteanu

Abstract
    For consumers, tenderness represents an essential sensorial feature for meat taste. The term “tenderness” is often utilised in alternation with the “texture” one. Meat texture is a complex phenomenon, which includes characteristics such as hardness, elasticity, chew ability, cohesion and succulence. Meat texture variations comes from inherently differences between muscular tissues (maintained compact by the structure of contractile proteins from conjunctive tissue), lipids, carbohydrates, as well as due to external factors, such as thermal treatment and manipulation of samples.
   Study aimed the evaluation of three storage regimes different by temperature and time, on three anatomic cut regions (breast, upper thighs and lower thighs) gathered from broiler poultry, for characterization of structure through Warner Bratzlers hear force.
   By comparison of the obtained means for musculature of the cut regions from poultry carcasses belonging to three experimental batches, were observed the existent minimums, those ones being attributed to meat samples gathered from carcasses of poultry from batch L3, variation interval between 9.05±0.923 and 15.34±1.204 N/cm² showing an increased tenderness, which could be associated with proteins’ degradation during storage.