Caracterização de coração suíno in natura e desidratado pelo método air frying

Abstract

Brazil is second in the world ranking with the largest population of pets, and this sector is the one that most favors the country's economy, due to new trends generated by industries, intending to meet the demands of those responsible for pets. The generation of a large number of by-products from the slaughter of big animals has encouraged the study of the nutritional properties of this offal, to produce pet food that ensures the identity of the raw material, in addition to maintaining the quality of nutrients, including snacks for dogs and cats. Thus, the objective of this work was to evaluate the drying process by air frying at 90°C in obtaining dehydrated sliced and ground pork hearts, in addition to analyzing their physicochemical properties and comparing them with dehydrated and fresh commercial hearts. The drying processes promoted a moisture content of 0.10 g water ∙ g-1 of dry solids in 210 min, while the sliced sample reached 0.09 g water ∙ g-1 of dry solids in 270 min. The moisture content of the pork heart was greater than 78% for the thawed and fresh samples, while the dry and commercial samples had a moisture content of less than 12%. The water activity in the thawed and fresh samples presented statistically equal results (average 0.991) and compatible with the literature, while the dry and commercial samples differed statistically from each other, but all were lower than 0.60. The commercial samples showed lower hygroscopicity (9.46 to 10.39 %), compared to the samples in this work (12.85 to 14.93 %). Instrumental color demonstrated that freezing interfered with the color of thawed samples, reducing the tendency to red (a*) and yellow (b*) compared to fresh samples. The dry samples presented a color similar to the commercial samples, except the ground commercial samples, which tended more towards yellow. The heme pigments in the thawed and fresh samples were statistically equal (3.27 a 4.68) and lower than the samples subjected to the drying process and commercial samples (4.09 a 11.44). The thawed sliced and fresh samples were statistically equal for hardness, which increased after drying. The greater hardness of the sliced commercial heart (214.98 N) is related to its greater thickness. There was greater shrinkage of the sliced dry samples (38.5 %) than the ground dry samples (28.6 %) after drying. In view of the above, we observed that the fryer drying process at 90°C presented promising results in relation to other methods, as there was a significant reduction in the humidity of the ground and sliced hearts in a shorter process time. Therefore, the use of the air fryer can be important for the development of industrial processes for dehydrated viscera such as heart and others, offering more options to the pet food sector.