EVALUATION OF SENSORY CHARACTERISTICS AND HEALTH SAFETY OF SHEEP MEAT PRODUCTS.

Dried and boiled sheep meat products made according to traditional technologies are highly valued by the people of the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkan countries. In recent years, the industry's interest in the production of these products has been growing by applying traditional production technologies in industrial conditions while meeting high levels of hygiene requirements and producing products with standardized characteristics. The acceptability of these products by consumers accustomed to certain properties of traditional products mostly depends on the sensory characteristics of industrially produced products. Therefore, in this work, the goal is to examine the sensory properties of dried and boiled sheep meat products, during the production of which eight different treatments were used. As said before, materials for this research were dried and boiled sheep meat products produced by eight different treatments. For research in this work, meat obtained from the Pramenka breed sheep, which were raised in a rural household, was used. Goats moved freely and fed on mountain pastures. The slaughtering and bleeding of the sheep was done in the local meat industry. After bleeding, the carcasses were cooled for 24 hours at a temperature of 1°C, and after being separated from the carcasses, the thigh meat was cut into pieces of equal size. After brining, the pieces of meat are heat-treated at boiling temperature or smoked and dried. Meat samples taken from pieces of finished products were used for chemical and sensory analysis. Sensory evaluation was conducted in the sensory evaluation laboratory by six trained evaluators (professors and faculty assistants). During the evaluation, a test of descriptive analysis was used. The obtained results were processed statistically. ANOVA was used to examine significant differences between treatments, and statistically significant differences between treatments were examined with the Tukey test (a = 0.05, p < 0.05 and a = 0.01, p < 0.01). The impact of different heat treatment procedures on the health safety of products was determined based on the content of heavy metals (ICP OES was used for the analysis), and PAHs (GC-MS was used for the analysis) in the finished products. Based on the overall score for sensor quality, the boiled and dried products met the evaluator's requirements. Average scores for boiled products were slightly higher than for dried products, although the difference was small. The overall sensory score influenced the selection of some experimental groups as treatments in which the products received the highest scores. Four out of 6 evaluators gave the highest rating (92.33 - 96.33%) to the samples of boiled sheep meat products obtained under the following conditions: time 1 hour and 47 minutes and temperature 65 - 75 °C. The majority of evaluators (4 out of 6) gave the highest score to sheep meat samples (89 - 95.33%), which were obtained by the drying process under the following conditions: drying time 2 hours at a temperature of 14 - 15 °C, smoking time 5 hours at temperature 14 - 15 °C, air circulation 40 - 50 m³/min. and air humidity 85 - 88%. The concentrations of detected heavy metals were within the permitted limit values. The obtained values were not statistically significant, which means that the temperature and time values in the processing had no significant influence on their content. The following PAH compounds were detected in sheep meat products: acenaphthylene (Acy), fluorene (Fln), phenanthrene (Phe), anthracene (Ant) and pyrene (Pyr), while the content of compound considered as toxicity indicator (benzo(a)pyrene) was not detected in the products in any of the experimental groups of boiled and dried products. The results obtained during the conducted research showed that sheep meat products made in industrial conditions according to traditional technologies have a high sensory quality, which indicates their acceptability by consumers. In addition, these products are completely safe for consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]