Study of mass transfer kinetics of chicken nugget during cooking by infrared system

Chicken nugget is one of the popular ready to eat food in the world. Due to high fat content in nuggets cooked using conventional method and obesity and corresponding disease, different methods such as partial frying and other final cooking method have been considered recently. In this study, chicken nuggets were cooked using several cooking methods including deep-fat frying, IR cooking, Pre frying - IR cooking (PF-IR) and IR cooking-post frying (IR-PF) using various IR power and process times. The effect of each treatment on moisture and fat contents and moisture loss kinetic (DeffandEa) of the chicken nuggets was investigated. The results revealed that fat content of samples reduced from 11.78% (control) to 2.18-11.62% in infrared, pre frying-infrared and infrared-post frying methods. The moisture and fat contents of the nuggets decreased when the higher IR power and longer process time were applied. The minimum moisture content was observed during PF-IR method (620 W-7 min). Moisture diffusivity value enhanced by increasing power of IR and the highest amount (2.69×10-8)was obtained in the sample prepared using pre frying-infrared process in 620 W and 7 min cooking time. Finally, cooking process modeling was conducted using Khazaei and Logarithmic models and the best model for describing each process was chosen. Logarithmic model was better for infrared cooking and Khazaei model was selected for describing pre frying-IR and IR-post frying mass transfer kinetics.