Strategies for Prolonging the Shelf Life of Minced Beef Patties

Abstract

The study of different strategies for prolonging the shelf life of fresh minced beef patties was addressed in this work. Fresh minced beef was supplemented with thymol (THY) at levels of 250, 500 and 750 mg per kg of ground beef. Treated samples were packed using a high barrier film and stored in refrigerated conditions (4C) under ordinary atmosphere packaging and modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) conditions for 16 days. The microbiological quality decay kinetic was determined by monitoring the following microorganisms: Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonas spp., lactic acid bacteria, Brochothrix thermosphacta, coliforms and total psychrotrophic viable count. Results show that THY, working alone, was effective on coliforms and Enterobacteriaceae, whereas it does not seem to inhibit to a great extent the growth of the other microbial populations. On the other hand, an increased amount of THY, under MAP conditions, had better effects on the product quality, with a consequent prolongation of the shelf life.PRACTICAL APPLICATIONSGreat interest is developing in food bio‐preservation, because of the ever‐increasing needs to protect consumers' health and to valorize the naturalness and safety of food products. However, very few works have been carried out on the applications of bio‐preservatives to extend the shelf life of fresh meat products. This study, therefore, was mainly initiated to evaluate the possibility of extending the shelf life of packed fresh meat patties by a combination of thymol (THY) to other extrinsic factors such as storage temperatures and modified atmosphere during packaging. Interesting results were obtained suggesting that THY can perform an efficient synergy with modified atmosphere conditions and could be advantageously utilized by the meat industry.

Effect of Sodium Alginate Coating with Ascorbic Acid on Shelf Life of Raw Pork Meat

“…Samples (20 g) in duplicate from the coated and uncoated meat skewers were aseptically homogenized for 3 min with sterile peptone solution (Oxoid, Milan, Italy) (180 mL) in a Stomacher LAB Blender 400 (Pbi International, Milan, Italy To quantitatively determine the efficiency of the strategies proposed in terms of microbiological quality, the same equation was also fitted to the microbiological data and the Microbiological Acceptability Limit (MAL), defined as the time at which the viable cell concentration reached its threshold, was calculated (Del Nobile et al, 2009;Mastromatteo et al, 2011). The threshold was set to 7 log cfu/g for total aerobic bacteria (ICMSF (International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods) Microorganisms in Foods, 1986).…”

“…In order to determine the Sensory Acceptability Limit, SAL (i.e., the storage time at which overall quality of product reached its threshold value), the re-parameterized version of the Gompertz equation was fitted to sensory data, as also reported in another work also dealing with fresh meat products (Del Nobile et al, 2009). …”

“…The shelf life value was calculated as the lowest value between SAL and MAL, thus representing the time at which one of the quality indices of the product reaches its threshold (Del Nobile et al, 2009;Mastromatteo et al, 2011).…”

Ready-to-cook fresh meal: study for shelf life prolongation

“…In order to determine the microbiological acceptability limit (MAL defined as the time at which the microbial loads reached the maximum value permitted), the re-parameterized version of the Gompertz equation was fitted to the total aerobic bacterial data (TAB), according to a similar approach also used in previous works dealing with shelf life of meat (Mastromatteo et al 2011;Del Nobile et al 2009). For TAB count the critical limit was set to 5x10 6 cfu/g referred to the 94/65 EC and 2073EC regulations (EC 1994EC 2005).…”

“…Samples with a score equal or higher than 4 were considered acceptable. A re-parameterized Gompertz equation was fitted to the sensory data (Mastromatteo et al 2011;Del Nobile et al 2009) to allow calculating the sensory acceptability limit (SAL), defined as the time at which the overall quality of product reached the threshold (score = 4).…”