Food Chemistry and Final Remarks

Gerald Irvine

16 November 2016

​There is a lot of food chemistry that is being incorporated within our product that we have learned in class. For example, we have been marinating our chicken in a tumbler to increase water retention and juiciness of our Schnitzel Finger. We increased the potency of this certain marination technique by creating a vacuum, which creates negative pressure and allows for more marinade to enter the chicken. When we first attempted to marinate the chicken, we tried an immersion marination. After a couple of hours in the marination, we noticed that the chicken came out too tenderized and fell apart at the slightest touch. In addition, the chicken on the bottom absorbed most of the marinade, preventing the top layer of chicken to be fully penetrated with the marinade. With that obstacle, we tried the vacuum tumbler for 7 minutes and obtained the desired flavor and texture we wanted. Another food chemistry related mechanism we used was incorporating vegetable oil in our beer cheese. The different oil, apart from the olive oil, provided steric hindrance against to prevent an orange film of oil from forming on the top layer of the cheese. Finally, one of our final main problems was fixing the adhesion of the breading and batter to the chicken. When bitten into, the crust came off of the Schnitzel Finger. We initially though it was the breadcrumb, but we decided to use some of the excess non-alcoholic beer in our batter process to thin out the eggs viscosity. The beer helped, in that it allowed for the crust to stay on the chicken, rather than fall off.

In order to perfect our product, we were able to use students and faculty of the poultry department to sample our product in order to provide general feedback for our Schnitzel Finger and beer cheese. Although, we were not satisfied with our original results from the sensory analysis, we used the information received to create a juicier Schnitzel Finger and creamier cheese. During our analysis, we provided the testers with two tenders (reheated vs freshly fried) and a sample cup of beer cheese. Our fresh fry chicken received the highest rating out of the two tenders, that being 6.73, whereas the reheated received a 6.00. Some of the participants stated that the chicken had a taste similar to pickle and was acidic. We reduced the amount of red wine vinegar to fix this undesirable taste. We believe that the sensory analysis from the faculty allowed for more honest feedback because we were not competing with them and they have worked in the poultry field. With consumer information, we were able to correct the problems that we did not notice as a team.

In all, we were able to create a product that we believe is viable for the American market and had fun during the process. We were able to learn many techniques throughout that allowed for us to perfect the Schnitzel Finger and beer cheese, such as vacuum tumbling, instead of immersion marination, and creating a cheese that did not separate.