Forty male broilers (49 days of age) were hand processed and randomly placed into four postmortem aging temperature treatments: 41, 28, 14, and 0 ± 1 C, 10 carcasses/treatment. Sarcomere length (SL) measurements were made on left Pectoralis (P.) major muscle at 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 h postmortem. At the end of 4 h, all carcasses (except 0 C temperature group) were chilled at 0 ± 1 C for 1 h. The right P. major muscles were removed, weighed, and frozen for cooking loss (CL) and tenderness (Kramer shear) measurements. There was a significant postmortem temperature (P<.05) and aging time (P<.001) effect for SL. Overall, sarcomere shortening was greatest at 0 C. The CL and shear values were 32.4, 29.6, 27.9, and 25.1% and 13.4, 12.9, 11.1, and 10.1 kg force/g for the 41, 28, 14, and 0 C treatments, respectively. Overall, 0 and 14 C treatments resulted in shorter SL, less CL, and lower shear values of P. major muscle than 28 and 41 C treatments.
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Bilgili et al. (1989) studied this question.