Abstract
Undesired volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can negatively affect the flavor of fresh food products; especially those characterized by a mild and delicate aroma. Finding connections between chemical and sensory analyses is a useful way to better understand the arising of off-flavors. A study was conducted on stracciatella; a traditional Italian cream cheese that is emerging on international markets. Samples were prepared by adding two different preservatives (alone or combined): sorbic acid and an olive leaf extract. Their influence on flavor preservation during refrigerated storage was investigated by chemical, microbiological and sensory analyses. A strong change of the VOC profile was ascertained after 8 days in the control cheese and in the sample added with leaf extract alone. The samples containing sorbic acid, alone or in combination with leaf extract, gave the best chemical and sensory results, demonstrating a significant shelf-life extension. In particular, these samples had lower concentrations of undesired metabolites, such as organic acids and volatiles responsible for off-flavor, and received better scores for odor and taste. Ex and Ex-So samples had significantly higher antioxidant activity than Ctr and So throughout the entire storage period, and the color parameter shows no differences among samples taken on the same day. The use of the olive leaf extract, at the concentration tested, seemed to be interesting only in the presence of sorbic acid due to possible synergic effect that mainly acted against Enterobacteriaceae.
Highlights
One of the decay’s symptoms of an expiring food is its smell [1,2]
Increase in volatile organic compounds (VOCs) formation during storage was expected, considering the typical chemical and microbiological characteristics of the product [27,30,31], and from these quantitative data it clearly appeared that a significant inhibition of their formation was associated to the presence of sorbic acid
In order to better understand the mechanisms of formation, the entire VOC data set was grouped into seven chemical classes (Table 2)
Summary
One of the decay’s symptoms of an expiring food is its smell [1,2]. the study of the volatile organic compound (VOC) profile can be very useful for establishing the organoleptic status of the product. It is widely used among researchers for milk and dairy products [11,12,13,14,15] and other foods [16,17,18] It is used in the flavoromics approach [19,20], because it is capable of ppb detection level for a wide range of molecular weight. Such a kind of studies is very useful for fresh foods, which are preferred by modern consumers and are highly perishable. Too, the consumer preference is increasingly orienting towards the fresh types, whose production volume in
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