PREDICTION OF WEIGHT LOSSES DURING STEAM COOKING OF MEAT

S.M. GOÑI; V. O. SALVADORI

Foz de Iguacu

Congreso; 16th World Congress of Food Science and Technology : ?Addressing Global Food Security and Wellness through Food Science and Technology?,; 2012

IUFOST

Meat cooking is an operation that affects both quality features and microbiological safety of processed products. During steam cooking evaporative weight loss is absent; however a high weight loss can be observed, due to meat proteins thermal denaturalization. This mechanism manifests itself as a force that expels liquid water from the product. In this work, the ability of a simple meat cooking model to predict weight loss during steam cooking is evaluated. Heat transfer is modeled using Fourier?s law, while the internal moisture content variation is modeled as a function of water demand, which depends on the meat water holding capacity, WHC. Simulations were done using the finite element method. The cooking model accuracy was assessed using reported experimental information of beef and tuna steam cooking, with constant thermal properties and WHC functions obtained for beef in earlier works. The model predictions were in good agreement with the experimental ones. For beef cooking the weight loss prediction was between 10.92-21.58% of raw weight, which is close to the experimental range of 15-18%; the average relative error was 4.75% for cooking time prediction. For tuna cooking, the weight loss prediction was 15.23%, which is also very close to the experimental value of near 14.5%. These results confirm that the approach adopted described both temperature and weight variations accurately. Finally, this simple mass balance can be easily coupled to well known stated heat transfer models, in order to provide them the additional capability of predicting the yield of the cooking process.