Processed Meats and the Processing Methods
About one-third of all meat is processed, meaning it has been changed from its original fresh cut. Ham and sausage are the most popular processed meat products. Other examples of processed meats include salami, bologna, bratwurst, and pastrami.
Processing Methods
Before the advent of refrigeration, meat was preserved by such processing methods as curing, smoking, canning, and drying.
Curing. Commonly cured meat products include ham, bacon, sausage, frankfurters, corned beef, and luncheon meats. Meat once was cured by saturating it with salt. Corned beef, a cured beef brisket, was so named because in the 16th century the word “corn” was used synonymously with “grain”, so meat rubbed with coarse grains of salt was called “corned”. Now the same result is accomplished with a mixture of salt, sodium or potassium nitrate, sugar, and seasonings. Nevertheless, salt remains one of the major flavoring agents of cured meat. The different proportions and combinations of ingredients used for curing contribute to the varying flavors of cured meats, which often garner additional flavor from being smoked.
There are several ways to cure meat. Dry curing consists of mixing the ingredients together and rubbing them into the surface of the meat, from where they work their way into the center. Another method involves immersing the meat in a brine or pickling solution. The most common commercial curing technique is one in which the curing solution is mechanically pumped or injected into the meat with a machine lined with needles. Meats injected with curing solutions increase in weight. If they are not shrunk back to their original weight through heating and/or smoking, and if they contain up to 10 percent added moisture, they must be labeled “Water Added”.
Although the original purpose of salting foods was to keep them from spoiling, now that refrigeration is widely available, meats are no longer cured solely for preservation. The high sodium content of many cured meat products now serves several purposes: to provide flavor, to improve texture by facilitating the binding or proteins, and to increase the proteins’ water-binding capacity, which reduces fluid loss within the packages, Nevertheless, lower-sodium processed meats are becoming increasingly available in the market.
Nitrites are sometimes used in curing meat to inhibit the growth of Clostridium botulinum, enhance flavor, and give the product a characteristic pink color. The safety of foods containing nitrites became an issue after the discovery that carcinogenic nitrosamines can form when nitrites combine with secondary amines in the stomach acid. This concern resulted in the lowering of nitrite levels used in processing, but not in their elimination, because of their role in preventing botulism poisoning. Antioxidants such as ascorbic acid (vitamin C) or vitamin E are now often added to cured meats to help reduce nitrite reactions.
Smoking. Most cured meats are also smoked and cooked. Smoke imparts flavor, aroma, and color to foods. Meats are placed in smokers, where they are exposed to the smoke of burning wood. In smoke houses, the intensity of the smoke, the humidity, and the temperature are all carefully regulated, and the type of sawdust or wood used to produce the smoke determines the product’s resulting flavor. Sawdust is the most economical and is often used by commercial processors, but other woods available for smoking include mesquite, hickory, oak, apple, and various combinations. In the late 1800s, a technique was developed to distill the smoke from burning wood to create “liquid smoke”, which could be spread on cured meats to achieve the same flavor as the smoke house method. Today the use of liquid smoke is more common, and it saves time and minimizes air pollution. Although the additional flavor provided by “smoked” meats is preferred by some consumers, there is some concern about its posing a possible cancer risk regardless of the type of smoking used.
Canning. Canned meats are processed through either pasteurization or sterilization. Pasteurized canned meats require refrigeration and are labeled “Perishable - Keep Refrigerated”, while those that are sterilized do not need refrigeration as long as the can remains sealed.
Drying. Drying is not widely used for meats, but it has some applications for them. Certain types of sausage, including pepperoni, salami, and cervelat, are dried. They are cooked, sometimes smoked, and dried under specific conditions of humidity and temperature. Beef jerky, usually dried to a water activity of 0.7 to 0.85, is convenient, ready-to-eat, and requires no refrigeration.
