Salt reduction in meat processing: effects of water state and quality of dry cured ham.

Salting is an ancient technology widely used in combination with other actions to preserve meat by water activity depression and development of desired sensorial properties. In recent times the health and nutritional concerns about sodium intake has led to a reduction of the salt content in processed meat products also in the case of the traditional ones. This is not easy task in the dry cured ham as salt plays an important technological role in the control of endogenous enzymes involved in the development of the main quality characteristics and in the water state of the final product.In this study the effects of changes in the salting process conditions on the salt diffusion and water state of a traditional smoked dry cured ham have been investigated. Raw hams of two different size (small-S and large-L) were subjected to a 2- or 3- salting steps process. Salt content, moisture and aw were determined on three muscle portions of the ham before and after salting up to 90 days of processing. The decrease of the number of salting steps reduced the salt diffusion and the salt content of the inner regions of the L-hams while no meaningful effects occurred when the same experimental procedure was applied to the small size raw hams. NaCl content and aw values of all the ham samples resulted to fit a linear model (r2> 0.80) and the linear equation was used to predict the final aw value of the differently salted dry cured hams. The predictive model highlighted the risk that based on the salt content determined at the end of the resting, 2-salting steps-L dry-cured hams will achieve an aw > 0.92 value that could impair the microbial stability of the product and compromise the sensory quality. [...]