Quality attributes of chicken nuggets extended with different legume flours

Chicken nugget is a comminuted meat product commonly prepared from spiced chicken meat and other ingredients. The tenderness of chicken meat lowers its firmness and mouth feel which may reduce acceptability of chicken nugget made from it. Thus, acceptability of chicken nugget could be harnessed when legume flour extenders are used along. Therefore, acceptability as well as quality of chicken nugget from different legume flours were evaluated. Soyabean, groundnut and cowpea flours were used as meat extenders for development of raw chicken nuggets and thereafter cooked for consumption. The quality of both raw and cooked legume flour extended chicken nuggets were assessed based on functional properties, sensory properties, proximate composition, amino acid content and shelf stability in terms of lipid peroxidation and microbial load. In their raw state, the legume flour extenders competed favourably with each other. Among all, soyabean flour extender maintained remarkable functional properties that transcend into significant (P < 0.05) yield of 86.93% of chicken nugget in comparison to the control (86.37%), groundnut (84.95%) and cowpea (84.50%). Upon cooking, all the legume flour extended chicken nuggets varied in their quality attributes. Apart from the high level of flavour and low microbial load, cowpea extended chicken nugget was of low quality based on the parameters evaluated in comparison with other legume flour extended chicken nuggets. Of interest, soyabean extended chicken nugget followed by groundnut extended chicken nugget were of good quality based on sensory properties, high crude protein and amino acid levels, low cholesterol content and lipid peroxidation value as well as low microbial load.

Graphical abstract