  We analyze the thermodynamical properties of a system of strongly interacting
particles at vanishing quark chemical potential in the framework of a recently
developed extension of the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio Model. In addition to
eight quark interactions terms, non-canonical terms which explicitly break
chiral symmetry up to the same order in a $1/N_c$ expansion ($N_c$ number of
colors) are included. A recently proposed Polyakov potential is considered and
the results are compared to lattice QCD data resulting in a favorable scenario
for the recent model variants.
