Quality of duck breast and leg meat after chilling carcasses in water at 0, 10 or 20 degrees C

Abstract

An experiment was carried out to investigate the effects of different chilling temperature on duck breast and leg meat quality. Duck carcasses were chilled for 30 minutes in water at either 0 degrees C, 10 degrees C or 20 degrees C within 20 minutes of post mortem with 6 carcasses per group. Results showed no significant effects of chilling temperature on ultimate pH, protein solubility, sarcomere length and shear force value for duck breast or leg meat (p > 0.05). Leg meat had higher ultimate pH, redness and shear force value, lower cooking loss, lightness, yellowness and protein solubility values than breast meat. The interaction of meat type and chilling temperature on cooking loss was significant (p < 0.05). The effect of chilling temperature on cooking loss was more severe in leg meat than breast meat and 20 degrees C chilling resulted in significantly higher cooking losses than the other chilling temperatures. Results of this experiment revealed that duck carcass can be chilled at 10 degrees C without any harmful effect on meat quality including toughness of meat.