Pork belly quality variation and its association with fatness level
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This document contains embargoed files until 2025-03-07
Publication date
2024-03-07ISSN
0309-1740
Abstract
Belly is a very popular pork cut composed of different layers of fat and muscle tissue. This work aims to investigate the effect of belly fatness on the morphological, mechanical (firmness) and compositional characteristics of fresh pork bellies and the distribution of the fat within the belly slice. A total of 182 bellies, selected to ensure variability of fatness, sexes and genotypes, were scanned by computed tomography (CT) to determine the fat content which, together with the genotype, led to the formation of 5 classes: F1 class below 26%, F2 class from 26% to 33.9%, and F3 class above 33.9% of fat content from common commercial crossbred pigs; F4 class with an average fatness of 47.3% from pure Duroc pigs; and last, F5 class with 62.6% average fat content from Iberian×Duroc pigs. The distribution of the fat in the central belly slice obtained by CT revealed important differences by region although the fat content was proportional to the overall fatness of the belly. Both belly weight and belly firmness increased with higher fatness. In bellies from common commercial pigs, an increase of SFA and MUFA and a decrease of PUFA as fatness increased was observed. This study highlights variations in belly characteristics among different fat classes, indicating considerable differences in the quality of bellies currently available in the market. This may influence producers and consumers acceptability such that fat content could be considered as a quality criterion to pre-classify bellies and better match the raw product with its final destination.
Document Type
Article
Document version
Accepted version
Language
English
Subject (CDU)
663/664 - Food and nutrition. Enology. Oils. Fat
Pages
42
Publisher
Elsevier
Is part of
Meat Science
Citation
Albano-Gaglio, M., C. Zomeño, J.F. Tejeda, A. Brun, M. Gispert, B. Marcos and M. Font-I-Furnols. 2024. “Pork belly quality variation and its association with fatness level”. Meat Science 213 (109482). doi:10.1016/j.meatsci.2024.109482
Grant agreement number
MICIU/Programa Estatal de I+D+I orientada a los retos de la sociedad/RTI2018-096993-B-I00/ES/CLASIFICACION Y EVALUACION DE LA CALIDAD GLOBAL DE LA PANCETA DE CERDO MEDIANTE TECNOLOGIAS NO DESTRUCTIVAS Y PERCEPCION POR PARTE DE LOS CONSUMIDORES/
EC/H2020/801370/EU/Beatriu de Pinos-3 Postdoctoral Programme/BP3
Program
Funcionalitat i Seguretat Alimentària
Qualitat i Tecnologia Alimentària
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- ARTICLES CIENTÍFICS [2555]
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/