Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 6: Paté and pastes – texture comparison

Paté & Pastes: Measuring Paté Firmness
 
More and more often paté is being eaten as a snack spread onto toast, bread or crackers. It is usually made by pre-cooking liver and other meats, mixing them with other ingredients, seasoning and then filling into moulds or casings. 

There are many variations as a result of using different ingredients and nowadays low fat paté is also an option. There are of course vegetarian alternatives which, more often than not, contain vegetables rather than a meat substitute.

A penetration test with a Cylinder Probe (see Figure 9) could well be considered the most simple of all tests for the assessment of firmness and several tests can be performed within the same sample. As the size of the probe surface area is constant this often means that the sample size does not need to be carefully controlled unlike compression testing.
 
Figure 10a shows typical texture analysis curves comparing a penetration test on two samples of commercially available paté: one sample is a duck liver pate whilst the other is vegetarian. The sample was positioned directly underneath a 10mm cylinder probe and a penetration test was then performed. The results (see Table 10b) indicate that the duck liver paté requires a larger force to penetrate and it therefore has a firmer consistency than its vegetarian counterpart. The duck liver paté is also shown to be more homogeneous which is reflected in the considerably lower variation in results.

 





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