Residual levels of curing salts and its antioxidant effect in Jerked beef

Abstract

Charqui meat (CH) and jerked beef (JB) are salted meat products basically differenciate from other by the absence and presence of curing salts, respectively. Seven Charqui meat and Jerked beef samples were obtained at random from Londrina region supermarkets and the possibility of curing salts to act as antioxidants was evaluated by quantitatively measurement of sodium nitrate and nitrite and their relationship its lipid oxidation. Sodium nitrate concentration varied from 27.7 to 83.6 ppm whereas sodium nitrite maximum value was 10.0 ppm in JB samples. The degree of lipid oxidation measured as TBARS in CH samples ranged from 1.03 to 1.78 mg of TBARS/Kg of sample whereas for JB this variation was from 0.23 to 1.38 mg of TBARS/Kg of sample. Our results demonstrated that JB samples presented lower concentration of sodium nitrite in relation to the limit allowed by the Brazilian legislation and the presence of sodium nitrate and nitrite inhibited notoriously the lipid oxidation in JB samples.