Determinação do melhor preditor da qualidade da barriga para produção de bacon

Abstract

Brazil is among the largest exporters of pork meat in the world, and bacon is one of the most profitable products for the Brazilian pork industry. Thus, the need to know more and more about the quality of the pork belly for bacon production arises. The water retention capacity of the meat (WAC) is an important factor in this quality issue, since it is closely linked to flavor, texture, color and aroma. This research was carried out with the objective of finding the best CRA predictor for pork belly, evaluating the loin, shank and topside by means of the compression technique according to Grau and Hamm (1953). A 0.5 gram of each piece per animal was collected and placed in duplicate on a filter paper, leaving a weight under the 10 kg crust for 5 minutes and after, the meat area and exudate area were marked with a ball point pen. The results obtained through the methodology were subjected to statistical analysis of correlation through the Pearson correlation coefficient to assess significance, followed by the Tukey test to assess the difference between the means of CRAs obtained from the pieces studied. It was found that the best predictor for the belly CRA is the crown region, being a weak correlation of 0.3 with significance (p<0.05).