Potential of Ohmic Cooking for Minimized Use of Gluten in the Production of Plant-Based Meat Analogue Patty

This study investigated the feasibility of ohmic cooking for the production of plant-based meat analog patties (PMAP) with minimal gluten use. Ohmic cooking allows electrochemical reactions to form protein structures and meat-like textures. The customized ohmic cooking system provided an electric field of 15 V/cm to PMAP mixtures with different gluten contents (6, 8, 10, and 12 %). The temperature of PMAP mixtures was ohmically increased to 70, 80, and 90 °C and then cooked for 3 min. Ohmic cooking minimizes the use of gluten in PMAP. In ohmic cooking at 80 °C, once the gluten content decreased from 12 % to 6 %, hardness was lowered from 52.83 ± 1.74 to 45.09 ± 1.11 N. However, in conventional oven cooking, hardness decreased from 77.15 ± 0.50 to 50.83 ± 2.77 N. Ohmically cooked meat analogs exhibited uniform temperature distribution and texture throughout their geometry. In ohmic cooking at 80 °C with 8 % gluten content, the hardness of the external and internal positions were 48.00 ± 0.19 N and 47.53 ± 0.72 N, respectively. Oven cooking exhibited significantly different hardness for the external (98.47 ± 0.01 N) and internal positions (66.32 ± 1.42 N). In the microstructure of PMAP, ohmically cooked meat analogues showed a more compact structure, uniform distribution of air pores, and no visually observable cracks compared with oven-cooked meat. This study demonstrates the potential of ohmic cooking to produce PMAP with minimal gluten use and quality retention.