Effect of maturation and freezing on quality and drying kinetics of beef

Summary

The quality of dried meat products and the drying kinetics significantly depends on the status of the raw material going into the drying process. The aim of this study was the determination of the impact of meat status (fresh, mature, frozen-thawed) on the drying kinetics and the resulting quality in terms of colour changes and spectrally deductible information.
Drying tests were conducted using meat from organically raised bulls. In fresh meat, freezing leads to a decrease of the drying rate, whilst for matured meat the opposite is true. Aging and freezing have little effect on the end product quality in terms of final product colour. However, water content can be detected hyperspectrally and resolved spatially for all stages of the pro-cess. With regards to water content prediction, the MCUVE-PLS method performs best for the fresh and fresh frozen-thawed version with seven wavelengths, an r2 of 0.97 and 0.88, and RMSE of 0.15 and 0.17 for the test set, respectively.