Ohmic cooking of ground beef: Effects on quality

Conventional cooking tends to be slow and the surface of the food always receives a much more severe heating treatment than the rest of the food. Ohmic heating has the potential to be much faster and produces even more cooking. In this work cylindrical ground beef samples having different initial fat contents (2%, 9% and 15%) were cooked ohmically (20, 30 and 40 V/cm) and conventionally. Ohmic cooking was faster than the conventional cooking (p < 0.05). Ohmically cooked samples were firmer than those conventionally cooked but yield and fat retention was similar. However, the reduction in volume during cooking was significantly smaller from 5.36% to 6.97% in ohmic cooking than the conventional system which was measured from 26.01 to 31.59. The voltage gradient applied during ohmic cooking was not related to the quality of the cooked meat. These results show that ohmic cooking could be a fast-alternative method for meat products. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.