Written by: Siyuan "Steven" Sheng, research assistant in the Meat Science and Animal Biologics Department of University of Wisconsin-Madison
For the last six months, we’ve tested different vegetable powders in the curing of organic meats at the new Meat Science and Muscle Biologics building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To learn more about how vegetable powders are involved in the curing of organic meats and meat curing in general, you can learn more here on our project page. Curing is a form of food preservation that prevents the spoiling of meat from bacteria and adds flavor through the addition of salts, sugars, or nitrites to draw out moisture, allowing the meat to last longer, anywhere from weeks to months, depending how the meat is packaged and stored.
Dehydrated celery or celery powder contains nitrite (NO2), a form of salt that is often used to cure meat. Most of the commercial curing powders used in organic meats are not organic.
Current regulations for organic processed meats allow the use of nonorganic vegetable powders, like celery powder, for curing meat, but these allowances are expiring and changes are coming to the USDA National Organic Program regulations to restrict this. Given this history, this is why this research is important: testing and expanding the procurement of organic celery and vegetable powders, so that the organic meat industry can comply with the USDA organic regulations for the curing and processing of meat.
To test the vegetable curing agents, we grind turkey breast to form deli meat and beef for frankfurters, adding in the organic celery and Swiss chard powders from the vegetables we have grown, as well as organic fruit powders to act as a catalyst for the curing process, and then compare the effectiveness of our curing agents to those that are commercially available.
As the meat ferments or cures in the cookhouse, the fermentation process converts the nitrites in the vegetable powders to nitrates. This process changes the color of the meat over time and after a couple of weeks in cold storage once the color is developed, we evaluate the meat.
Using members in our department as panelists for now, we perform sensory evaluations or “taste tests” of the cured meats after 14 days, and also look at the levels of residual nitrite and color stability in the turkey deli slices and beef frankfurters after up to 90 days to assess the shelf life of the cured meats from our experiments. To measure the color stability of cured processed meat, we take colormetric measurements using a “Hunter meter” and refractometer and to measure levels of residual nitrites, we use high-performance liquid chromatography.
Next steps moving forward will be to evaluate vegetable cure agents, like celery powder, on other types of meat and using other cooking methods with a larger panelist pool that is more representative of consumers for a more formal sensory evaluation.
Different treatments of celery and fruit powder cure agents on turkey deli meat