Effect of Dietary Vitamin E on the Stability and Sensory Quality of Turkey Meat

Abstract

An experiment was carried out to evaluate the effect of vitamin E in diets (containing .5% soybean oil and 125 mg ethoxyquin/kg) fed to turkeys from 12 to 24 weeks of age on the stability and the sensory quality of their meat after 7 months of storage at −18 C.Increasing the vitamin E supplement from 5 to 45 mg/kg diet improved the stability of breast and drumstick (estimated by the thiobarbituric acid test), but a significant effect (P<.05) was observed only in breast meat. The effect on meat stability of feeding the high-vitamin E diet for the last 4 weeks only was similar to that of feeding this diet throughout the experiment.Breast muscle was consistently more stable than the drumstick meat. This difference was rather small just after frozen storage, but it increased under conditions favoring meat deterioration.Sensory evaluation of the meat using identification tests, preference ranking, nonparametric ratings, and parametric scores did not show that dietary vitamin E level improved the quality of breast and thigh meat. However, the drumstick meat of turkeys fed the diet containing the high level of vitamin E throughout the experiment was of significantly higher sensory quality than meat of birds fed the low-vitamin E diet. Meat of turkeys fed the high-vitamin E diet during only the last 4 weeks occupied an intermediate position.