Effects of High-pressure, Sous-vide Cooking and Commercial Freezing on the Physicochemical Properties of Moisture-enhanced Restructured Pork

Pretreatments, including heating or freezing for the handling of restructured meat, can cause quality deterioration during cooking due to excessive drip loss. This study investigated the effects of high-pressure (HP) processing (200 MPa for 15 min), cooking methods, and freezing on the quality characteristics of moisture-enhanced restructured pork (MERP). The MERP was formulated to 84% moisture and compared with a control with 74% moisture. The MERP was applied to conventional cooking (75°C for 30 min) and sous-vide cooking (55°C for 24 h), and parts of sous-vide cooked MERP were frozen at −30°C for 24 h to assess quality deterioration. Results revealed that HP cooking effectively bound meat cubes in MERP, and further cooking enhanced the binding strength of MERP products. During cooking, sous-vide improved the moisture retention of MERP. However, freezing increased the cooking loss of MERP, particularly of frozen and reheated MERP, which exhibited the highest cooking loss among the treatments. Despite the fact that the moisture loss of freezing treatments negatively affected the tenderness of the MERP products, frozen MERP retained a tender texture compared with the unfrozen control. HP combined with sous-vide cooking rarely affected the cooked color of MERP, and the MERP products exhibited normal cooked color of meat products. Therefore, the present study indicated that HP and sous-vide cooking improved the quality characteristics of MERP, which suggested that MERP could achieve better consumer preference than typically manufactured restructured meat products.