Investigating the change mechanism and quantitative analysis of minced pork gel quality with different starches using Raman spectroscopy

Minced pork gel often faces challenges during preparation, such as sticking and splitting, which can result in a loose structure, significantly compromises its quality. This study aimed to improve minced pork gel quality by incorporating different starches: mung bean starch (MBS), potato starch (POS), pea starch (PES), and corn starch (CS), focusing on enhancing water-holding capacity (WHC) and gel strength. Raman spectroscopy was employed to investigate the mechanisms behind gel quality changes and to develop quantitative predictions of WHC and gel strength in response to starch addition. The results showed that 15% starch addition was optimal, with POS performing best. Notably, starch addition promoted alpha-helix and random coil transformation into beta-sheet and beta-turn in protein structure. Additionally, the starch-minced pork gel system exhibited enhanced cross-linking and density through hydrophobic interactions, contributing to improved WHC and gel strength. Finally, to quantitatively assess the gel quality change under different starches, support vector machine (SVM), uninformative variable elimination-SVM (UVE-SVM), genetic algorithm-SVM (GA-SVM), and adaptive reweighted sampling-SVM (CARS-SVM) modeling were built. Among these, UVE-SVM model achieved the optimal performance for both WHC (Rp(2) = 0.8553, RPD = 2.1567) and gel strength (Rp(2) = 0.8508, RPD = 2.1981). Therefore, this study demonstrates that the addition of starch, particularly POS, can enhance minced pork gel quality by improving both WHC and gel strength. Moreover, it establishes Raman spectroscopy coupled with UVE-SVM as a reliable method for non-destructive, and rapid detection of these quality parameters in minced pork gel under different starch conditions.