HISTOLOGICAL, PHYSICOCHEMICAL AND MICROBIOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF PORK SMOKED LOIN MADE OF INJECTED FROZEN MEAT

Meat processing industry largely uses frozen meat as raw material and applies the post-thawing processing. This situation often implies working with lower quality meat, when compared to using fresh, unfrozen meat and fresh fish. As brine injection is known to enable the retaining of more moisture during cooking, we aimed to evaluate whether brine injection before freezing raw meat, has any effect on the quality of the meat products obtained from previously injected thawed meat. Boneless pork loin samples (Longissimus dorsi) were subjected to freezing in two groups: fresh meat (control) and brine injected meat (test). After two weeks, they were thawed and further processed to smoked loin in a meat processing facility. Only control meat was subjected to brine injection after thawing. The resulted smoked loin was refrigerated for 2 weeks and subjected to quality evaluation, by histological assessment of product structure. Also, the shelf life was evaluated by monitoring moisture content, pH and aerobic plate count (APC) during storage. The histological evaluation of the structure revealed higher quality for ham obtained from the test meat. The moisture content was higher, while the pH and APC followed improved shifts during storage, for the test meat, compared to the control one. This study suggests that injecting pork meat prior to freezing might be correlated with higher quality processed products, which tend to have improved shelf life.