Research Article
Isameldin B Hashim, Saada Al N
Abstract
Meats contain visible and/or intramuscular fat. Dietary recommendations encourage consumers to protect themselves against chronic diseases by increasing their intake of healthy foods and reducing their intake of fat. Extracting fat from ground meat using supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) has several advantages (no residual effect, low toxicity and reduction of extraction time) compared to traditional organic solvents. The objectives of the study were to produce low-fat ground lamb meat (LFGLM) using SC-CO2 extraction and to determine its quality (proximate composition, rehydration ability, rehydration capacity, instrumental color and sensory characteristics) compared to freeze dried, commercial low fat and minced lamb (control) meats. The visible fat of lamb meat shoulder was trimmed. The trimmed meat was minced (CO) portion was freeze dried (FD). LFGLM was produced by extracting FD minced meat using SCCO2 extraction. Seventy eight percent of the original fat was extracted at 45oC, pressures 500 bar and a CO2 flow rate of 3 ml min-1. The results showed that, LFGLM had the lowest moisture and fat content and the highest protein and ash. Rehydrated SC-CO2 and FD meats had similar rehydration ability and rehydration capacity. Rehydrated SC- CO2 meat had a lighter color with less redness (highest L* values and the lowest a* values). Trained sensory panel results indicated that LFGLM had similar lamb aroma, fat aroma and overall quality intensities, and significantly lower blood aroma, color, surface shine and greasy touch intensities compared to the CO meat. Healthy and stable low fat ground lamb meat can be produced by SC-CO2 extraction.