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Food texture : Concept and measurement

1996; EDITIONS PUBLICATIONS ALIMENTARIAS SA; Issue: 272 Linguagem: Inglês

0300-5755

María Teresa Sánchez Pineda de las Infantas,

Meat and Animal Product Quality

One of the important factors of food is texture or mouthfeel. The quality and acceptability of foods are influenced considerably by textural properties normally associated with them. Texture can also be used as a criterion for selection of raw materials or as a factor in ascertaining market grades of many food products. The underlying concept is that texture is not a simple property of food but is extremely complex, being composed of several interrelated parameters. Rheological studies of food and objective measurement of textural properties of foods continue to be a problem to the food technologist. The objective measurement of texture (hardness, toughness, stringiness, brittleness, viscosity, mealiness, and other characteristics, which go by various names) is important in itself, since such texture is subjectively sensed by the consumer; or it may be important because the texture has been found to be strongly correlated with flavour, maturity, colour, or other factors which determine quality in raw and cooked foods. The foods for which a satisfactory methods of objective evaluation has been found represent a important portion of the foods that are consumed. In the large number and variety of instrument developed to measure the textural characteristics of one or more foods, the emphasis has usually been placed on a particular food of group of foods, and the instruments have been designed around some particular kind of working parts which compress or shear the food product in some manner. Because food texture is composed of too many variables, it is not possible to obtain an overall index in a single measurement. In general, therefore, only those properties which have the greatest influence on consumer acceptance are measured. The mechanical properties are the most critical for many foods. The purpose of this paper is to review the concept of food texture, the characteristics of texture, the relationship between texture and food and the instrumentation (Universal Texturometer Machine) used to measure this property.