Balite, Roma Ananiel A.
February 18, 2014
1BS Food Technology 2013-63218
Tocino Manufacturing
Last week’s discussion discussion involved the topic of of meat preservation. Preserving meat means the inhibition of the action of microorganisms, wherein food products are ensured to be low in microbial load and that consumer safety are well observed. There are 5 types of preserving meat; one is drying, freezing/chilling, canning, smoking and curing. For last week’s exercise, we’ve focused to a specific type of preservation— preservation—curing. Curing is simply defined as the addition of curing agents such as salt, sugar, nitrate/nitrite, phosphates, ascorbates and spices. The principle of meat curing can be viewed as a race between penetration of curing ingredients and proliferation of microorganisms. Whichever comes first will give the result. Therefore, one must ensure that the curing agents would be the first to occupy. Salt inhibits the growth of microorganisms by withdrawing water, sugar acts as a humectant, while nitrates serves as antimicrobial and that ascorbates gives off the reddish color of the meat and spices for taste. There 4 general methods of curing namely, dry curing method, sweet pickle, injection, and the combination method. But in these exercise, we’ve chose the dry curing method. The dry curing method involves no solution, which means that it only requires application of dry ingredients. The process of dry curing is broken down into five: 1) chilling, 2) trimming, 3) weighing, 4) washing and lastly dripping. One common product of curing is the well-known tocino. That’s why in this exercise, we were required to p roduce tocino through the process of dry curing. The following are the steps in tocino manufacturing. First, slice the meat (across the grain) into 1/8 to ¼ inch thick. Second measure the following ingredients based on the weight of the meat. For 1 kg of meat, 12 tbsp. sugar, 4 tsp salt, 1 1/3 tsp Prague powder, ½ tsp MSG and 1 tsp ground black pepper. After the ingredients were mixed evenly, sprinkle or spread the mixture of ingredients over the meat slices. Mix all the meat and ingredients to promote even distribution of the curing agents. Pile the pieces of meat on a clean bowl and cover with food wrap. Then, keep the pork tocino in a refrigerator for 3 to 7 days to cure.
