Quality Characteristics of Breast Meat during Post-mortem Storage of Chicken Meat

This study was first conducted to investigate the effect of post-mortem storage time of chicken meat on the quality of chicken breast, and to determine whether the current grading rule that is `using the chicken meat within 2 day post-mortem (PM)` is appropriate or not at meat processing plants. Different methods such as freshness, lightness (), total number of microbes, 2-thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), shear force and cooking loss were performed. Forty samples of different PM time (0~4 day) of chicken meat were stored in the refrigerator (). As a result of comparing the chicken meat of 2 day and 3 day PM, torrymeter value was 6.9 and 7.0, respectively. The other values are also as follows: lightness () 60.22 and 60.51, total number of microbes 4.20 and , TBARS value 0.056 and 0.071 mg MDA/kg, shear force 1.43 and , and cooking loss 17.24 and 15.66%, respectively. As a result, these two groups were not significantly different (P