Sensory characteristics of cooked pork loin as affected by nucleotide content and post-mortem meat quality

Muscle longissimus dorsi excised at 2 hr post mortem was utilised to study the effect of post-mortem meat quality, and their content of nucleotide met abolites, on the sensory characteristics of cooked loin. Four different pos t mortem meat qualities were defined: pale soft exudative (PSE), red soft e xudative (RSE), red firm non-exudative (RFN) and dark firm dry (DFD). The D FD meat quality class showed low sour and salty tastes and a high sweet tas te, low astringency and high juiciness and tenderness, giving the best over all quality. On the other hand, the RSE quality class produced a meat with a low juiciness and high hardness, and a low overall quality although these differences were not significant (p < 0.05) against RFN and PSE meats. The effect of nucleotide metabolite contents on the sensory meat properties we re most significant on taste although, the different meat qualities were on ly significantly different (p < 0.05) in the content of hypoxanthine, guano sine, GDP and IDP. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.