Influence of the Illumination on the Color and the Appearance of Meat during Baking Process

When cooking, the color and the appearance of meat is important to judge whether meat is cooked or not to eat safely. However, the color and the appearance of objects depends on the spectral distribution of light. Therefore, in this study, we measured surface colors of cooked meats under some lights with different spectral distributions and conducted an experiment to clarify the suitable lighting conditions for cooking beef, chicken and pork ground meats. As a result, judgments of the degree of cooking depend on not only the correlated color temperatures but also spectral distribution of lighting and the judgement was easier under comparatively high correlated color temperature conditions. In conclusion, for suitable lighting for cooking meat, it is necessary to consider the spectral distributions in addition to the correlated color temperature of the illumination.