| Abstract: | Pre-cooked pork and poultry products contribute more than $6 billion to the meat industry in the US, and are traditionally manufactured and stored as frozen products. One of the major concerns by meat processors about pre-cooked products is their high susceptibility to lipid oxidation. The development of off-flavors, such as warmed-over flavor (WOF), from lipid oxidation limits the shelf-life of these products to less than 6 mo. To retard lipid oxidation, synthetic antioxidants such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) are added to increase shelf-life. With the increasing demand for more natural products, recent research has shown that sorghum bran is a quality inhibitor of lipid oxidation. We analyzed sorghum bran as an antioxidant by adding 0.25%, 0.5% and 0.75% of either Sumac or Black, high tannin sorghum bran to pre-cooked sausage patties, bratwurst and pre-cooked turkey patties, and 0.25% and 0.5% to dark meat chicken nuggets. A negative control (no antioxidants added) and two positive controls (0.02% BHA/BHT and 0.2% rosemary extract) were added to the study. Products were manufactured and stored on Styrofoam trays over-wrapped with polyvinyl chloride film at 4°C for 0, 1, 3 and 5 d of storage and re-heated to 70°C and served to a trained sensory panel on d 1 and d 3 to test descriptive flavor attributes. Thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) were used to evaluate lipid oxidation. Descriptive sensory traits were not affected (P > 0.05) by antioxidant treatments. No antioxidant treatment effects (P > 0.05) were found in chicken nuggets, bratwurst or pre-cooked sausage patties for TBARS, but the addition of sorghum bran to turkey patties yielded similar or lower (P < 0.05) TBARS values than BHA/BHT. These results suggest that high tannin sorghum bran can be used as an effective antioxidant without negatively affecting sensory flavor attributes. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/152516 |
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