Developing Minced Fish Products of Improved Eating Quality: An Interplay of Instrumental and Sensory Texture

Abstract

This treatise attempts to combine effectively data from instrumental and sensory texture, thus overcoming the empiricism pervading the development of processed fish products. Traditional fish burgers or sausages are made mostly with added starch but fail to offer a new marketing position that satisfies consumer's expectations of a tasty meal. However, the eating quality of minced fish products can be improved by including in the formulation relatively small amounts of proteins and non-starch hydrocolloids, thus taking advantage of their multifaceted functionality as texture modifiers. Such product formulation leads to the identification of distinctive upper and lower bounds of the attributes of instrumental texture in relation to increasing sensory acceptability. This can be further manipulated via a strong correlation between instrumental and sensory attributes of texture engineered by increasing the concentration of a single ingredient in the formulation. Within this extended spectrum of valid implementation of the quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA), affective testing can pinpoint a particular preparation of optimum overall consumer acceptability.