14B-4

M. WETTASINGHE, T. VASANTHAN*, F. TEMELLI, and K. Swallow. Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G2P5, Canada

Chicken by-products retain a substantial amount of flesh that could be exploited in thermal generation of aroma. The existing literature on chicken aroma is extensive, but none of them provides a complete quantitative description on roasted aroma. Therefore, an understanding of the aroma composition of roasted chicken by-products was necessary.

The objective of this study was to identify and quantify aroma compounds in roasted chicken flesh and various chicken by-products, namely breastbones, backbones, spent bones and skins.

Ground chicken flesh and by-products were roasted separately at 375°C for 45 min and steam distilled to collect 300 mL of aroma-enriched distillate. Aroma compounds were then extracted into methylene chloride, solvent evaporated (to a final volume of 150 µL) and an aliquot of 5 µL was analyzed by GC-MS. Aroma compounds were tentatively identified and their concentrations were determined using 2,4,6-collidine as the internal standard.

The concentration of total aroma in flesh, breastbones, backbones, spent bones and skins was 2648, 2712, 2030, 3100 and 4049 µg/kg sample, respectively. Of the total aroma of roasted flesh, 24, 2, 30, 15, 4, 14 and 2% (w/w) were aldyhydes, ketones, alcohols, hydrocarbons, nitrogen and/or sulfur containing compounds and miscellaneous compounds, respectively. Most of the aroma compounds detected in the roasted flesh were also present in the roasted by-products, but there were obvious quantitative differences among them.

This study demonstrated that chicken by-products were incapable of generating the desirable roasted chicken aroma when they were roasted individually. This suggests that roasting of a blend of several by-products may be necessary to generate an aroma profile comparable to that of the roasted flesh.