Establishment of chicken soup flavour evaluation method based on electronic tongue and fuzzy mathematics

In order to develop a robust and objective method for evaluating the taste of chicken soup using the electronic tongue as an objective evaluation index instead of the traditional sensory evaluation of chicken soup, two types of local chickens (Green-footed Sesame Chicken and Daninghe River Chicken) reared using two rearing methods (caged and free-range) at the age of 120 days were used as research subjects in the present work. As compared to the cage mode, the fuzzy sensory score showed that the chicken soup stewed in the free-range mode possessed better sensory quality. Moreover, in the same rearing mode (caged and free-range), the sensory quality of Daninghe River Chicken soup was better than the Green-footed Sesame Chicken soup. The results showed that the electronic tongue effectively distinguished different chicken soup samples. The analysis of variance, principal component analysis, and gray correlation were used to establish the correlation between chicken soup electronic tongue and fuzzy mathematical sensory scores. The results showed that the correlation between the electronic tongue data and the fuzzy mathematical sensory scoring system was high. These results provided a reliable basis for using electronic tongue data instead of sensory scoring. The present work successfully established a direct connection between the electronic tongue and fuzzy mathematical sensory evaluation methods, which provided a simple, fast, and accurate method for optimising the production process, and evaluating the quality of chicken soup using electronic tongue and other testing methods.