The effect of intense light pulses on the sensory quality and instrumental color of meat from different animal breeds

I Tomasevic

doi:10.2298/bah1502273t

Abstract

Intense light pulses (ILP) are an emerging processing technology, which has a potential to decontaminate food products. The light generated by ILP lamps consists of a continuum broadband spectrum from deep UV to the infrared, especially rich in UV range below 400 nm, which is germicidal. Evaluation of the effect of intense light pulses (ILP) on sensory quality of meat, game and poultry was performed using two kinds of red meat (beef and pork), two kinds of poultry (chicken and turkey) and three game meat samples (deer, rabbit and kangaroo). All the samples were treated with 1 and 5 light pulses (pulse duration of 300 ?s and pulse intensity of 3.4 J/cm2) at a rate of one pulse per 2 seconds. Sensory quality changes induced by intense light pulses were different and depended on animal species, type of meat and ILP dose applied. Only the odour of all the meat, poultry and game samples suffered significant changes after the pulsed light treatment. Of all kinds of meat investigated only turkey received scores below the good quality grade after the treatment. Instrumental colour values remained unaffected in chicken and rabbit meat samples while higher doses of ILP significantly compromised both redness and yellowness only in pork and turkey meat.

Highlights

IntroductionIntense light pulses (ILP), known as pulsed light (Oms-Oliu et al, 2010), high intensity broad spectrum pulsed light (Roberts and Hope, 2003), pulsed white light (Kaack and Lyager, 2007; Marquenie et al, 2003) and pulsed UV light (Bialka and Demirci, 2007, 2008; Keklik et al, 2009) are included among the emerging technologies that are intensely investigated as an alternative to thermal treatment for killing pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms (Barbosa-Canovas et al., 2000; Elmnasser et al, 2007; Gomez-Lopez et al, 2007; Palmieri and Cacace, 2005; Woodling and Moraru, 2005)
Intense light pulses (ILP), known as pulsed light (Oms-Oliu et al, 2010), high intensity broad spectrum pulsed light (Roberts and Hope, 2003), pulsed white light (Kaack and Lyager, 2007; Marquenie et al, 2003) and pulsed UV light (Bialka and Demirci, 2007, 2008; Keklik et al, 2009) are included among the emerging technologies that are intensely investigated as an alternative to thermal treatment for killing pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms (Barbosa-Canovas et al., 2000; Elmnasser et al, 2007; Gomez-Lopez et al, 2007; Palmieri and Cacace, 2005; Woodling and Moraru, 2005).The inactivation mechanism of ILP is similar to that of continuous UV-C light; it causes the formation of thymine dimmers which renders microbial cells unable to replicate; this is called the photochemical effect (Gómez-López, 2012)
Sensory quality changes induced by intense light pulses were different and depended on animal species, type of meat and ILP dose applied

Summary

Introduction

Intense light pulses (ILP), known as pulsed light (Oms-Oliu et al, 2010), high intensity broad spectrum pulsed light (Roberts and Hope, 2003), pulsed white light (Kaack and Lyager, 2007; Marquenie et al, 2003) and pulsed UV light (Bialka and Demirci, 2007, 2008; Keklik et al, 2009) are included among the emerging technologies that are intensely investigated as an alternative to thermal treatment for killing pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms (Barbosa-Canovas et al., 2000; Elmnasser et al, 2007; Gomez-Lopez et al, 2007; Palmieri and Cacace, 2005; Woodling and Moraru, 2005). The inactivation mechanism of ILP is similar to that of continuous UV-C light; it causes the formation of thymine dimmers which renders microbial cells unable to replicate; this is called the photochemical effect (Gómez-López, 2012). If microbial inactivation is a critical requirement, it is essential to keep the nutritional and sensory properties of the product, minimizing the possible loss of quality caused by the treatment (Hierro et al, 2012)

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