DISCUSSION

Sterilization process refers to any process that eliminates, removes, kills or deactivates all
forms of life and other biological agents such as fungi, bacteria, viruses and spore forms present
in a specified region, such as a surface, a volume of fluid, medication or in a compound such as
biological culture media. There are many types of sterilization method which includes heat,
chemical, irradiation, high pressure and filtration. In this experiment, heat sterilization method had
been used for canned chicken in prepared sauce. Heat sterilization can be classified into two
categories, dry heat sterilization and moist heat sterilization. For this experiment, we had used an
autoclave which falls in the moist heat sterilization. Moist heat sterilization is a sterilization
technique that utilizes hot air that is heavily laden with water vapor and the moisture plays an
important role in the process.

The method of the experiment can be divided into four parts which is preparing the sauce,
preparing the chicken, canning process and evaluation on the canned chicken. To start off the
experiment, the sauce was prepared by dissolving the prepared sauce per the instruction at the
packaging. Next, the chicken that will be canned was prepared by firstly cutting the chicken into
small pieces. After it was cut into smaller pieces, it was cleaned thoroughly to remove any soil and
potential contaminant and finally the chicken was steamed until half cooked. After that, the
canning process will take place to ensure that the chicken in the prepared sauce will be secured in
a can. The can was seamed and was put in an autoclave at temperature 121°C for 30 minutes. The
can later was stored for 3 weeks (21 days). Lastly, an evaluation was done to examine the internal
surface of the can and canning quality. Furthermore, to also evaluate the canned chicken in terms
of odour, colour, texture, taste as well as overall acceptability.

Based on the results for physical evaluation of canned chicken, the attributes that were
evaluated are odour, colour, texture of the flesh, texture of the bones, taste and overall
acceptability. The attributes was then evaluated using the scale of 1 which equals to dislike
extremely until 5 which equals to like extremely. From Table 1, which is the physical evaluation
of canned chicken for 0 day. During the 0 minute, the overall acceptance for the canned chicken
is 3 which falls in neither dislike or like. During the 15 minutes, the overall acceptance of the
canned chicken was 4 which falls in like moderately. Based on the results acquired from Table 1,
we can observe that there are significant difference for the odour, colour, texture of the flesh and
bones, the taste and overall acceptance. The canned chicken during 15 minutes was preferred more
than during 0 minute. Meanwhile, from Table 2, which is the physical evaluation of canned chicken
for 21 days. During the 15 minutes, the overall taste is still 4 which is like moderately but the
scales on the other attributes decreases especially for the taste.

From this observation, the canned chicken during 15 minutes for 0 day and during 15
minutes for 21 days has the highest rating of acceptance. This is because, the canned chicken has
been exposed to heat treatment in an autoclave and all of the contaminating bacteria had been
destroyed including their spores. From here, it is proven that moist heat sterilization are more
effective in killing microorganisms than dry heat sterilization because the process cause
destruction of microorganisms by denaturation of macromolecules, primarily proteins.