However, these products represent a relatively small proportion of total
cooked meats and no results have yet been presented on the quality of
ohmically cooked noncomminuted meats. The direct application of
ohmic heating to solid food is limited (De Alwis & Fryer, 1992). There
are no studies on the production technology for solid food with
commercial-level sterility attained by heating at 100 °C or higher or by
ohmic heating without the use of conductive liquids.
The ohmic method requires uniform conductivity values within the
meat which means that a perfectly even distribution of injected salt or
brine solutions must be achieved in the case of non-comminuted
meats. A lot of research was done on electrical conductivity of foods
(Palaniappan & Sastry, 1991) and on the changes in electrical
conductivity of foods during ohmic heating (Halden, De Alwis, &
Fryer, 1990). Sanjay, Sudhir, and Lynn (2008) published a paper
about the change of electrical conductivity values over a special
temperature range in a very small unit. This research team looked
mainly into the electrical conductivity changes of fruits and also a
few details about the behavior of different meat pieces were
published but there is still a lack of research in the ohmic heating
of full meat products.
A novel cooking method such as ohmic heating may offer a number
of advantages, such as quicker cooking and less power consumption and
safer product, however, the important considerations for a food product
are its taste, quality, and customer satisfaction.