The effects of various mixtures of pork leg meat and chicken breast meat, ranging from 0 to 100% on quality attributes of raw meat-emulsion batters and kung-wans were investigated. Increasing the content of chicken breast meat altered the color by increasing lightness and yellowness, increased protein solubility, and increased hardness. Hardness and springiness play important roles in kung-wan, and consumers prefer those having a firmer, harder texture. The emulsion stability changed with different mixtures of pork leg meat and chicken breast meat. With mixtures of meats, the emulsion stabilities were lower. The treatments which containing chicken breast meat had a higher storage modulus than 100% pork leg meat at temperatures higher than 60℃, and so had better texture. The results showed that chicken breast meat, at 50% substitution for pork leg meat, improved the quality of kung-wan.Keywords: kung-wan, emulsion stability, dynamic rheological, protein solubility, texture *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: xlxu@njau.edu.cn
IntroductionEmulsified meats are available in a large range of products that provide the consumer with a wide choice of textures and flavors depending on their method of production. Commonly, different types of specific products originate from individual countries or regions where tradition has played a large part in their development. One such product is the Chinese-style meatball, or kung-wan, which is made primarily from pork and is a popular meat product in Taiwan and related Chinese communities (Hsu and Chung, 1998). It is a typical emulsified meat product, commonly made with pork leg meat and back fat (Hsu and Chung, 1999). Consumers regard texture is an important factor of this product, and in particular, springiness and cohesiveness are two attributes that define this ball-shaped meat product. Springiness is to some extent the result of inclusion of air during the beating method used in their production.These important textural properties are highly dependent not only on the method of fabrication but also upon the properties of the myofibrillar proteins and the characteristics of the muscle tissue. It has been reported for instance that muscle from pork and chicken have different gelation properties (Cofrades et al., 1997;Iwasaki et al., 2006;Kang et al., 2010) which affects the product texture. The salt soluble proteins (SSP) of muscle are the most important functional proteins for the manufacture of emulsified meat products. Muscle is classified by fiber type. Pork leg meat (PLM) is comprised primarily of type IIB fibers, and other is type I and type IIA myofibers (Suzuki et al., 1999), whereas chicken breast meat (CBM) is composed of essentially 100% white muscle fiber (fiber type IIB) (Nakamura et al., 2004). Different muscle types exhibit different the heat-induced gelation properties of SSP (Xiong, 1994).The consumption of chicken meat continues to grow around the world. Chicken meat is viewed as a tastier, healthier, lower in fat-content than pork (McCarthy et ...