In this context, considering that the cooked meat cuts
subjected to the vacuum cooling process present an increased
porosity (McDonald et al., 2001a), a VI after the VC stage can be
an interesting alternative for compensating part of the cooling
weight loss without the increased cooling time of the IVC process.
Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate two alternative
processing strategies aiming to reduce or compensate the weight
loss of cooked chicken breast fillets subjected to cooking and vacuum
cooling. Such strategies were based on: (i) the integration of
immersion cooking (ICk) with pulsed immersion vacuum cooling
(PIVC), resulting in a ICk-PIVC process; and (ii) the use of a new
approach that incorporates an integrated vacuum impregnation
(VI) stage on the immersion cooking and standard vacuum cooling
process, resulting in a ICk-VC-VI process. Both evaluated processes
(ICk-PIVC and ICk-VC-VI) were compared to the integrated process
of immersion cooking followed by the vacuum cooling with the
samples immersed in the cooking solution (ICk-IVC), the integrated
process of immersion cooking followed by standard vacuum
cooling (ICk-VC), and also to the conventional process of
immersion cooking followed by the cooling in a cold chamber
(ICk-CC). Such a comparison was performed in terms of the
cooling rate, weight loss, and physical–chemical and mechanical
properties of the obtained product.