Influence of cooking process on protein fractions in cooked ham and mortadella

Abstract

The mortadella is a pork meat sausage (in natural or artificial bowel) accurately triturated and mixed with little backfat cubes, salt, sodium nitrate and nitrite, spices and peppercorns, and then cooked in oven for many hours. The cooked ham is obtained from an anatomically completed piece of meat; the working process provides the addiction of salt and spices, the brine, the bones removal, the churning and the pressing, so the cured meat is first packed in a mould provided for this purpose, then cooked and after cooled and packed. The meat cooking is the last step in the cooked sausage production technology, and let us obtain a stable and eatable product. The effect of the heat and the lenght of processing are the main responsibles for modifications in water- and salt-soluble protein fractions. Indeed myofibrils denature themselves after cooking and consequently their solubility decreases; particularly the denaturation begins over 30°C in the myosin chain, instead the actin solubility begins to decrease over 60°C, being the actin more stable than myosin (Barbieri et al., 1997)...