SENSORY CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH SERRANO DRY-CURED HAM

A specific descriptive lexicon has been developed to evaluate the flav or of Spanish ''Serrano'' dry-cured ham. Dry-curing of pork legs produ ces a unique flavor difficult to define in regular meat terms, This le xicon for the flavor of dry-cured ham may be used by researchers to st udy flavor-development during the curing process. In this paper we hav e applied the lexicon to the study of dry-cured flavor developed in tw o different manufacturing processes that differ only in the length of the drying stage. The long processed dry-cured ham (12 months) is stro nger for 8 of the 16 sensory attributes studied than the short process ed dry-cured ham (7 months). During the long curing process of the rip ening-drying stage, we found that the typical dry-cured flavor develop ed was defined by three factors: ''cured flavor,'' ''off-flavor'' and ''pork flavor,'' whereas in the short curing process typical dry-cured flavor was not fully developed.