Integrated cooking and vacuum cooling of chicken breast cuts in a single vessel

The objective of this work was to develop and evaluate integrated processes of cooking and vacuum cooling of chicken breast cuts in a same vessel aiming at avoiding product manipulation and reducing the processing time. In this context, three integrated processes were compared with respect to weight loss and processing time: (i) vapor cooking followed by vacuum cooling; (ii) water immersion cooking followed by draining the cooking water and vacuum cooling; and (iii) water immersion cooking followed by vacuum cooling with the product immerse in the cooking water. Shorter cooling times were obtained using processes (i) and (ii), where the cooling is performed in non-immersed samples, while smaller weight losses are obtained using process (iii). Consequently, for applications in which weight loss is not an issue, processes (i) and (ii) must be used. Alternatively, process (iii) can be used for obtaining smaller weight losses with a larger cooling time.