4. Conclusions
The effect of feeding fat sources on the quality and composition
of lipids of raw meat and precooked ready-to-eat
fried chicken patties, was studied. Two homogeneous
groups of broilers were fed with animal fats and vegetable
oils, respectively. A traditional technology (flash-frying plus
humid steam-convection oven cooking) was employed to
process broilers meat to obtain ready-to-eat meat-based
patties. Lipid hydrolysis and oxidation was evaluated in
the initial, intermediate and final products. The results confirm
that different fat sources can effectively influence the
stability, quality and composition of poultry meat lipids.
Lipid hydrolysis and oxidation were more intense in ground
raw meat obtained with animal and vegetable fat integration,
respectively. Lipid oxidation was influenced by the
unsaturation degree of the fat source. However, these differences
tended to decrease along the technological process,
due to the addition of other ingredients and to the oil
absorption. Although flash-frying and humid steamconvection
oven cooking promoted lipid degradation, the
overall quality of the precooked chicken cutlets is acceptable
from the oxidation standpoint, displaying low levels
of both peroxides and COPs. However, it must be pointed
out that part of the oxidation products may have decomposed
or combined with other molecules, such as Maillard
reaction products and proteins, during oven-cooking. In
addition, the raw meat used for the patties preparation
already presented an advanced degree of oxidation, regardless
of the type of fat integration; the holding period and
grinding may have greatly affected the meat oxidative status.
Considering that the amount of oil absorbed by chicken
cutlets can reach up to 8% of their weight, the quality of the
precooked cutlets depend to a great extent on the quality of
the frying oil. Since oil phytosterols can oxidize in a similar
way to cholesterol, it would be important to perform further
studies to evaluate the presence of phytosterol oxidation
products in these food products, as well as to
monitor the stability of the lipid fraction during the shelflife
of the final products.