TENDERIZATION OF HOT-BONED BROILER BREAST MEAT BY CLAMPING DURING CHILLING

Authors: CASON JR, JOHN; LYON, CLYDE; DICKENS, JAMES

Submitted to: Poultry Science
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/24/2001
Publication Date: 1/1/2002
Citation: CASON JR, J.A., LYON, C.E., DICKENS, J.A. TENDERIZATION OF HOT-BONED BROILER BREAST MEAT BY CLAMPING DURING CHILLING. JOURNAL OF POULTRY SCIENCE. 2002. V.81: 121-125

Interpretive Summary: For poultry producers, breast meat is the most valuable part of the chicken, with high consumer demand in grocery stores and restaurants. If breast meat is deboned too rapidly, however, the resulting meat can be tough and unacceptable to consumers. As a result, breast meat is usually aged on the carcass for six or more hours before it is deboned, causing additional processor expenses such as increased holding time in expensive refrigerator space, chilling of bones that will be discarded, and difficulties with scheduling of labor on different shifts. In this experiment, breast meat was deboned within five minutes of evisceration and clamped between two closely spaced aluminum plates to prevent toughening during chilling. Clamping the breast meat for two hours produced cooked breast meat that was more tender than typical values for meat that is aged on the carcass for twenty-four hours before deboning. Deboned breast meat that was clamped for one hour during chilling was tender and had a higher cooked yield than meat that was aged on the carcass for the same length of time. Clamped meat was also flatter, which would allow better portion size control. If the process can be adapted to industrial conditions, clamping of early deboned breast meat would increase the efficiency of production and improve the quality of meat at the consumer level.

Technical Abstract: Hot-boned broiler breast fillets were tightly clamped between rigid aluminum plates during chilling to determine whether tenderness is increased if fillets are not allowed to shorten during rigor. In 2 experiments, six-wk-old broilers were processed in a pilot plant. Five min after evisceration, the fillets (Pectoralis major) were deboned and each fillet was subjected to one of two treatments while chilling for 2 h in ice slush: fillets were placed either in perforated plastic bags (hot-boned control) or clamped between rigid aluminum plates which compressed the meat to a uniform thickness of 7.2 mm during chilling. In Experiment 2, chilling time in ice slush was 1 h & a third treatment was added to make an incomplete block design: one breast half was left intact on the carcass & was deboned immediately after chilling. All fillets were sealed in plastic bags after the chilling period, held overnight at 4 C, & then cooked at 85 C for 30 min in a steam kettle. In Experiment 1,clamping for 2 h reduced Warner-Bratzler shear values of hot-boned fillets from 11.4 to 2.7 kg. In Experiment 2, shear values for the treatments were 13.0, 9.2, and 5.1 kg for the hot-boned, cold-boned,& hot-boned clamped treatments, respectively, with significantly lower shear values for the clamped fillets. Clamped fillets were significantly thinner than the control fillets in both experiments. Cooked yield as a percentage of postchill weight was significantly higher for the clamped compared to the hot-boned control pieces, 81.1 versus 77.3 %, with cold-boned pieces intermediate & not different from the other treatments. Shear values were reduced & cooked yield was increased by clamping hot-boned fillets during chilling.