The beauty of both worlds: let the people eat delicious rest assured meat.

Original title: the best of both worlds: let the people eat delicious rest assured meat
meat processing is China's agricultural products processing and food industry pillar industry, the output value of 1.3 trillion yuan. At the dinner table of ordinary Chinese, traditional bacon and Western-style low-temperature meat make up most of the meat.
The flavor of pickled bacon products is rich, but for a long time the "home base is unclear", the flavor formation mechanism is unclear, the processing technology is backward, the quality is difficult to guarantee;
how to break through these two technical bottlenecks, so that people eat delicious and assured healthy meat? Over the past 20 years, Professors Zhou Guanghong and Xu Yulian of Nanjing Agricultural University's School of Food Science and Technology have worked tirelessly to solve these problems by working tirelessly on the mechanism and key technologies of meat flavor and gel quality. On January 10, the results were awarded the second prize of the 2019 National Science and Technology Progress Award.
Test out the traditional Chinese meat flavor "home base
la moon came to make bacon, grow moldy meat flavor, in the southern region of love to eat bacon, the New Year's custom implied the people's understanding of the source of bacon flavor. However, mold dominates flavor, such a "talk of experience" is really reliable, scientific?
zhou Guanghong team after many years of exploration found that the mold that grows on the surface has nothing to do with the formation of meat flavor. Zhou Guanghong told China Science Daily: "Not only the two are not related, 'meat sprinkled salt, the rest of the day' traditional pickling method production cycle is long, fat oxidation is serious, will lead to meat products salt too high, quality is uncontrollable." "
so, what makes bacon so delicious, and how do these flavored substances make bacon delicious?"
found that the key to flavor formation is actually the role of endogenetic enzymes. Endogenase, as the name implies, is the enzyme that exists in the muscle itself, commonly has the decomposition of protein tissue protease, protease, peptidease, peptidease, and so on, as well as the breakdown of lipid lipid lipase, phospholipase and so on. Zhou Guanghong introduced that in the process of marinating, these enzymes by catalyzing the protein and fat inside the meat to break down, resulting in a delicious flavor substances - free amino acids, oligopeptides and esters and other small molecular substances. The team's discovery reveals the secrets of the rich flavor of traditional Chinese bacon products, and was named one of China's top ten scientific highlights of 2007 by Nature China.
"home base" to find out, the mechanism of exploration, which means that you can say goodbye to the "eat by the sky" era, through technical means to regulate endogenetic enzyme vitality to control flavor. According to the above-mentioned concept, Zhou Guanghong led the team to find out the most suitable temperature range, length of time and environmental conditions, developed a "low temperature marinade - medium temperature air-drying - high temperature mature" modern production technology, product salt content reduced by 50%, the production cycle significantly shortened, the excellent product rate increased from 75% to more than 97%, to solve the traditional bacon production cycle is long, fat oxidation is serious, product salt is too high and flavor quality difficult to control the technical bottleneck.
in recent years, in addition to traditional bacon products, vacuum
-packed Western low-temperature meat products have been increasingly placed on supermarket shelves. The so-called Western-style low-temperature meat products, refers to foreign production and consumption of large, processing temperature in the 68 to 72 degrees C of pasteurization interval of meat products, such as vacuum-packed smoked ham, emulsified intestines and so on. When it was first introduced, domestic meat processing enterprises copy the Western process parameters, resulting in serious oil out of the water, product color change, shelf life is short, the West's delicious meat products to China after the emergence of "water and soil do not accept" the situation.
can I lock up water and oil? Zhou Guanghong believes that the first thing to do is to find out the water out of the oil. Therefore, they started with the fine structure of meat and found that the quality of low-temperature meat products mainly depends on the gel and emulsification properties of muscle protein.
"The muscles have a lot of myogen fibrin, which, under heating conditions, forms a 'shoulder-to-shoulder' cross-linking, as if it were a tiled mesh that effectively locks in moisture." Zhou Guanghong said that the gel mechanism explores how this "lock water network" is woven out, know how the net is woven, you can make the mesh more solid by turning the mesh hole large, smaller and other means.
so, the water is preserved, how to lock the oil? How exactly does muscle protein adsorption to fat? After research, they found for the first time that under the guidance of the oil-water interface, the muscle protein has undergone structural changes, hydrophobic group exposure, and lipid fusion formed an emulsified interface protein membrane, that is, the formation of a "water-packed oil" structure, a process known as "emulsification." The findings fill a gap in the theory of emulsification of muscle gels in China.
Based on the new mechanism to develop a new technology for gel control, the team also developed an efficient compounding of marinade preparations, so that the cooking loss of low-temperature meat products significantly reduced, the quality structure has been significantly improved, effectively solve the Western-style low-temperature meat quality is poor, water out of the oil serious problems. On this basis, they also identified the main strains that lead to corruption of low-temperature meat products, expounded their long-term law, and worked out the key control points of the production and processing process.
Relying on the National Meat Quality and Safety Control Engineering and Technology Research Center, the team has been working with Yurun, Aibo, Huading and more than 30 other meat processing leaders in key technology and equipment research and development, technology integration applications for more than 20 years of joint research and development, the development of meat flavor and gel quality control key technologies, listed 75 new products, 31 patents granted.
"Our research focuses on the country's major strategic needs and cutting-edge issues in agriculture and food science, so that people eat well and eat at ease." Zhou Guanghong said.
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