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.

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 5: Chicken tenderness – texture comparison

Chicken Tenderness: Multiple Shearing

Empirical methods of assessing texture are often challenged by lack of homogeneity or uniformity in samples. 

Heterogeneous systems, such as unprocessed meat products can have structural elements that can vary considerably for the same overall chemical composition. Sometimes the sample to be analysed may be of variable configuration or structure from piece to piece such as for chicken strips. 

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 4: Sausage shearing – texture comparison

Reformed Products:
Sausage Shearing using Warner-Bratzler 
 
For the testing of circular samples, the Warner-Bratzler Blade (as shown in Figure 4) is recommended, as it provides a larger cutting surface around the product at the start of the test by means of its triangular notch in the middle of the blade. 

With a slotted base insert, the knife is able to cut through the entire sausage providing a crude method with little sample preparation which lends itself ideally to quick quality determination. It is the most common biting or shearing system for the assessment of meat and meat products. 

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 2: Texture Measurement of Meat and non-Meat Products

As whole tissue, meat is a natural product that possesses inherent variability due to many factors. As a sample for testing this can present a common problem to assess the texture repeatably. 

Processed meats are of three general types: deli-styles (for example turkey, bologna), that are sliced; formed meats (meat balls, meat patties, chicken patties, chicken nuggets); and sausage-style meats, which are usually tubular shaped. Processed meats are often investigated to assess, for instance, ideal combinations of ingredients, evaluate contribution of processing methods/times and highlight quality inconsistencies. 

Substituting your Meat at mealtimes: Part 1: Introduction

A health or environmental choice?

Across the country, people are choosing to eat less meat for the health of their bodies and the planet, whether for one meatless day per week or a lifetime. 

The ‘fake meat’ business has been around for decades, but it has not quite taken off due to price or down to visual, textural or flavour failure. However, the meat-fakers say they are on the verge of a breakthrough, that there is a real possibility that a new era of fake meat – nutritious, cheap and indistinguishable from the real thing, made either of synthesised animal tissue or derived from plant material – may be upon us.

Using Texture Analysis in the Competitive world of Haircare development

Human hair and skin become soiled due to its contact with the surrounding environment and from the sebum secreted by the scalp. 

The soiling of hair and skin causes it to have a dirty feel and an unattractive appearance.  Shampooing cleans the hair by removing excess soil and sebum. However, shampooing can leave the hair in a wet, tangled, and generally unmanageable state. Once the hair dries, it is often left in a dry, rough, lustreless, or frizzy condition due to removal of the hair's natural oils. 

The Battle of the Confectioners in the Development of Chocolate

Chocolate continues to be the world’s favourite confection bringing to mind images of comfort, indulgence and taste. 

With a successful product comes tough competition between the major players in the confectionery world to make new advances in product development. Pushing the development envelope to create new novel versions of such a product requires the tools to assess and compare the effects of new processes and ingredients. This is where texture analysis becomes a manufacturer’s best friend.

Investigating the Full Picture of Adhesive Testing

The development of Texture Analysers has opened up a wealth of opportunities for adhesive testing and analysis. 

Most recently the ability to replay, freeze-frame and share your product testing data using a Video Capture and Synchronisation System has been introduced. This is a fantastic tool for teaching others about the nature of your product and for those new to the field or, more importantly, to help you gain a frame-by-frame understanding of your product failure.