2.7. Meat flavours

Raw meat have a distinctive flavour but it is that of cooked meat with which we are most familiar. It is well established that the quality of the flavour of cooked meats depends not only on the nature of the meat itself, particularly the ratio of lean to fat, but on the method of cooking (i.e., dry roast, stewed, etc.) and the temperature/time conditions involved.

The amino acids present in the raw meat are essential to the Maillard reaction but their patterns and quantitative ratios do not appear to have significance to the ultimate flavour profile of cooked meat. The presence of lipids is the determinant in this respect.

The compounds responsible for the characteristic flavour of cured meat are still unknown but is generally accepted that nitrite plays a major role in the development of that flavours. Comparison of volatile fractions from cured and uncured pork have shown that the cured product is very poor in end-products of lipid oxidation (pentanal and hexanal). It is likely that inhibition and deviation of the mechanism of lipid oxidation and secondary reactions involving N-containing intermediates are associated to produce the typical cured flavour (Dumont et al., 1990).