DIFFERENTIATION OF CURED COOKED HAMS BY PHYSICO-CHEMICAL PROPERTIES AND CHEMOMETRICS

Comparison of physico-chemical and compositional traits was carried out on cooked hams. Deboned fresh pig thighs of three different origins were divided into three batches: 200 pig thighs from the Italian market, H1; 200 from The Netherlands, H2; and 200 from Denmark, H3. Boneless pig thighs were processed under commercial guidelines for production of cooked hams, using brine at 25% level of injection. After processing, 12 cooked hams from each batch were sampled randomly and analyzed for proximate and fatty acid composition. Color measurement was performed on the muscles: biceps femoris, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus. H1 hams showed a higher weight loss and a lower technological yield compared to H2 and H3 hams. Analysis of variance on compositional data showed that H1 hams had a lower moisture/protein ratio, a higher fat content, a lower percentage of α -linolenic, eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acid, and a higher percentage of myristic and palmitic acids when compared to H2 and H3 hams ( P   <  0.05). Analysis of color of the three muscles demonstrated that hams from the H1 group had the highest a * values. The application of linear discriminant analysis demonstrated that the use of only four variables allowed to correctly discriminate among groups of cooked hams.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

The following are the practical applications of this research. The comparison of physico-chemical and compositional traits were carried out on cooked hams. Pig thighs of different origin were processed under commercial guidelines. The physicochemical parameters of cooked hams were defined and showed some differences characterizing the products.