Desidratação de pulmão suíno como produto mastigável (snack) para animais de estimação

Abstract

The growing humanization of pets is driving the pet food market, creating a demand for safe, stable, and sustainable products that utilize co-products from the meat production chain to enhance their added value. This study investigated the dehydration of porcine lungs to develop a chewable snack for pets. The methodology included the physicochemical characterization of fresh pork lung, the evaluation of convective oven drying and cast-tape drying, and the characterization of the resulting dried product. The process variables evaluated in both methods were: temperature (70, 80, and 90 oC) and lung thickness (3, 4, and 5 mm). The results indicated that fresh pork lung has high nutritional value, with moisture at 83.51%, protein content at 12.56%, fat at 1.70%, and ash at 0.98%. Convective drying presented a longer process time compared to cast-tape drying for samples with moisture content of 10% or lower, resulting in darker products with lower retention of total heme pigments, which varied between 29.52 and 44.08 mg/g of sample, and lower heme iron retention, ranging from 0.1 to 0.15 mg of HFe/g of sample. In contrast, the cast-tape drying method showed greater efficiency in retaining the red color, with total heme pigments varying between 41.25 and 52.98 mg/g of sample, greater retention of heme iron (from 0.14 to 0.18 mg of HFe/g of sample), and higher water activity, which was below 0.4 in most conditions. The lungs dried at 80 and 90 oC at all thicknesses in convective drying, and at 90 oC with 5 mm thickness in cast-tape drying, were more hygroscopic than those under other conditions. The drying methods did not significantly influence the proximate composition of the dried product, thus maintaining the nutritional quality of the pork lung. Additionally, instrumental texture analysis revealed that convective drying resulted in hardness values between 5.00 and 20.35 N, while cast-tape drying presented values between 7.04 and 14.70 N. The moisture sorption isotherm curves, modeled by the GAB and BET models, indicated a sigmoid behavior characteristic of materials with high initial affinity for water, with monolayer moisture values close to 0.06 g of water/g of dry solids. It is concluded that dehydrated pork lung has significant potential as a chewable snack for pets, offering nutritional benefits and contributing to the valorization of by- products from the meat industry. Dehydration by cast-tape drying has proven to be a promising technology for producing high-quality dried animal products, preserving the nutritional properties of the product.