OBJECTIVE MEAT QUALITY MEASUREMENTS OF HAM - A PRACTICAL CLASSIFICATION METHOD ON THE SLAUGHTERLINE

Meat quality is one of the principal problems in Spanish dry cured ham production. At the experimental level, there are well developed objec tive instrumental measurements which can be made on the slaughterline and then, by applying the correct statistical treatment, these measure ments can be used to classify hams with an acceptable degree of accura cy. These treatments, however, are not easy to apply in the industry. In this work, 312 pork carcasses were tested at three industrial abbat oirs. Ham meat quality was determined by internal light scattering (FO P), electrical conductivity (EC) and pH measurements in Semimembranosu s (SM) muscle at 45 min and 24 h post mortem . The results obtained we re: 21 (6.7%) DFD; 168 (53.9%) slightly DFD; 104 (33.3%) normal; 11 (3 .5%) slightly PSE; and 8 (2.6%) PSE. A simplified method has been deve loped for classifying hams into quality categories, by deriving a theo retical quality value (Q) based on a simple statistical treatment of v alues for FOP, EC and pH. The multiple linear regression coefficient o f Q was R2 = 0.85 (P<0.001) with respect to the experimental variables .