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

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe quality of dried meat products and their drying kinetics significantly depends on the status of the raw material going into the drying process. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of meat status (fresh, mature, frozen–thawed) on the drying kinetics and the resulting quality in terms of color changes and spectrally deductible information. Drying tests were conducted using meat from organically raised bulls. In the fresh meat, freezing leads to a decrease in the drying rate, while for matured meat, the opposite is true. Aging and freezing have little effect on the end product quality in terms of final product color. However, water content can be detected hyperspectrally and resolved spatially for all stages of the process. With regard to water content prediction, the Monte-Carlo uninformative variable elimination-partial least square method performs best for the fresh and fresh frozen–thawed version with seven wavelengths, an r2 of 0.97 and 0.88, and RMSE (Root mean squared error) of 0.15 and 0.17 for the test set, respectively.