Overall, phosphate addition increased the hardness of cooked lamb
loin samples, such an effect being more marked in sous vide cooking
. Despite the effect of myofibrillar and collagen
heat denaturation on cooked meat texture, water loss from the muscle
tissue upon heating also play a key role in meat toughening, so that the
greater the water lost during cooking, the higher the cooked meat toughness
(Bertram, Aaslyng,&Andersen, 2005; Palka&Daun, 1999). However,
the hardness parameter in the TPA basically assesses how a meat cube
may withstand compression; thus, the more swollen the meat becomes
due to the addition of phosphates, the greater the force that is needed
to compress it. A similar tendency was shown for SF values of sous vide
cooked lamb loins, inwhich swollen samples due to the injection of phosphates
showed higher SF values than those injectedwithwater (Table 3).
, but also to the fact
that in oven roasted samples, due to the slightly higher temperature
and longer cooking times, the shrinkage of myofibrillar proteins is most
likely more intense than in sous vide cooked ones, while the degradation
of collagen is not as intense, leading to a higher overall SF values. In such a
situation, the relative contribution ofwater retention to the texturewould
be lower than in sous vide cooked samples, in which the impact of both
myofibrillar proteins and connective tissue on SF would be lower
(Li, Zhou, & Xu, 2010; Roldán et al., 2013).