Tenderness and juiciness of freeze-dried chicken meat as related to maturity of birds. Poultry Sci

ALTHOUGH freeze-dried chicken has- highly acceptable flavor, color and storage stability, a dry and tough texture often remains after rehydration. This deficiency in texture has been attributed to the loss of water holding capacity by the muscle proteins, and protein denaturation during drying was suggested as the cause of this loss (Brooks, 1958). According to Hamm and Deatherage (1960), the decreased ability of meat pro-teins to rehydrate was usually due to the formation of an excessive amount of elec-trostatic and hydrogen bonds between actin and myosin in the myofibrillar filaments. Connell (1957) suggested that increases in toughness and a loss of gel-forming abil-ity in dehydrated fish might be due to in-creased crosslinking of protein chains. He proposed that this could also cause dryness, due to poor water-binding capacity. Gawronski et al. (1964) concluded that sulfhydryl/disulfide exchange had an im-portant role in post-rigor tenderization. Kahn and van den Berg (1965) recently reported that the sulfhydryl group content and tenderness of chicken muscle decreased simultaneously during cooking and frozen storage. Lowe (1948) stated that meat from young birds, when aged for the same period of time, was more tender than that from older birds. Seltzer (1961) found that older, more mature birds produced th