For the last six months, we’ve performed testing on vegetable powders for the curing of organic meats at the new Meat Science and Muscle Biologics building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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 and allow 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, and is often used to cure meat. Most of the commercial vegetable curing powders used in organic meats are not organic.

Current regulations for organic processed meats allow the use of nonorganic powders for curing meat but changes are coming to the USDA National Organic Program regulations to restrict this. This is why this research is important, we are finding botanical alternatives for the organic meat industry to comply with the USDA organic regulations for curing and processing.

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, including 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 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 look at the levels of residual nitrite and color stability in the turkey slices and beef frankfurters after 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 for measuring 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.

Treatments of vegetable and fruit cure agents on turkey deli meat.

Beef frankfurters that have been treated with different vegetable cure agents before going into the smokehouse.

A colormetric meter for measuring shelf life of the treated and cured meats.

High-performance liquid chromatography machine to identify and extract levels of residual nitrites.