Optimisation of Mechanically Deboned Chicken Meat (MDCM) aromatic herbal sausage formulations using simplex-lattice mixture design

Nowadays, consumers are demanding for more natural foods, obliging the industry to include natural antioxidants instead of synthetic antioxidants to retard lipid oxidation and control spoilage bacteria in foods in order to improve their quality and nutritional value. Thus, various types of herbs and spices have been added in a variety of foods to improve their quality. Mechanically Deboned Chicken Meat (MDCM) sausage which is very susceptible to microbial growth and oxidation due to the extensive stress during the machine-deboning process and frozen storage resulted in decrease functionality of the product. This study was aimed to determine an optimum formulation of MDCM herbal sausage incorporated with three dried herbs using mixture design (Design Expert 8.0.1) software. Thirteen formulations of MDCM herbal sausages consisted of three independent variables: Persicaria hydropiper (X1), Murraya koenigii (X2) and Etlingera elatior (X3) were developed. The effects of these aromatic Malaysian herbs on the total phenolic content (TPC), antioxidant activity and sensory qualities (aroma, colour, firmness, herbal taste, juiciness, after taste and overall acceptability) of sausages were determined using Folin-Ciocalteu colorimetric method, 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) Radical Scavenging assay and Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA), respectively. The three independent variables had significant (p