Soft condensed matter perspective on moisture transport in cooking meat

Abstract

in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com).We have viewed cooking meat from the perspective of soft condensed physics and posed that the moisture transport during cooking can be described by Flory-Rehner theory of swelling/shrinking polymer gels. This theory contains the essential physics to describe the transport of liquid moisture due to the denaturation and shrinkage of the heated protein matrix. The validity of our hypothesis is shown by a numerical model, which comprises a linearization of the Flory-Rehner theory augmented with Darcy's law for porous media flow, applied to the simulation of cooking experiments performed on a rectangular piece of beef. Reasonably, comparable results are obtained from simulations and experiments. Further analysis of simulations resolves yet another unexplained phenomena observed during heating of meat. Literature review suggests that Flory-Rehner is applicable to cooking of other gel-like foods.

A mathematical model of meat cooking based on polymer–solvent analogy

“…Inspired by van der Sman's pioneering works, in conjunction with experiments conducted by Shen et al [22], we focus upon the development of a two-phase, soft condensed matter physics based mechanistic model to simulate the transport phenomena within a beef steak when simultaneously heated from both sides. The presented work differs from [8,19] in several ways. While van der Sman studied the convective oven cooking of meat using the Flory-Rehner theory, the present work aims at numerically simulating the double sided conductive pan cooking of beef using the simplified Flory-Huggins theory.…”

“…The flow under this scenario is driven by a pressure gradient. Extending the porous description of muscle, and drawing analogies from soft condensed matter physics, van der Sman [8,19] deduced a model for heat and mass transport during cooking of meat. This approach considers that meat is composed of a polymer matrix made of protein and that the Flory-Rehner theory holds true.…”

“…While van der Sman studied the convective oven cooking of meat using the Flory-Rehner theory, the present work aims at numerically simulating the double sided conductive pan cooking of beef using the simplified Flory-Huggins theory. In addition, we formulate the conservation equations for a two phase mixture (as opposed to the Darcy's porous medium transport alone in [8,19]) of a polymer and a solvent, both of which are dealt with a continuum approach. Our approach in dealing the protein and solvent phases separately via a two phase model allowed assessing the effect of porosity of meat on cooking time, which has not been studied hitherto.…”

A Mathematical Model for Meat Cooking

“…where D a denotes the diffusion coefficient of water in air, k a the thermal conductivity of air, ρ a the density of air, c a the specific heat of air, M f the molar mass of the fluid, and c 0 the water vapor concentration in the boundary layer [24]. In empirical investigation, Bengston (1976) found that the wet-bulb temperature changes in the oven during cooking; and thus, in order to validate the model, c 0 is modeled to match the empirical wet bulb temperature [2].…”

“…To account for shrinkage during cooking, it is often considered that the change of dimensions is proportional to the volume of fluid loss [8,16,21]. While heat and mass transfer in solid food was incorporated in [4,24], they neglect shrinkage. In [11], the authors consider shrinkage as the integrated result of temperature dependent and volumetrically-distributed shrinking.…”