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2.6.4. Cooked meat
According to MacLeod and Seyyedain-Ardebili,1981, the flavour of cooked meat is due to a mixture of compounds, including:Raw meat contains three types of non-volatile components which affect flavour: taste compounds, flavour enhancers and aroma precursors which generate volatile components mainly on eating.
The most important taste compounds in meat are inorganic salts (salty), hypoxanthine (bitter), sugars (sweet), organic acids (sour), nucleotides, amino acids, and peptides. most amino acids contribute sweet and/or bitter tastes; a few contribute a sour taste, while the sodium salts of glutamic acid and aspartic acid provide saltiness and other tastes ( Kirimura et al., 1969).
Flavour enhancers are glutamic acid, inosine-5-monophosphate, guanosine-5- monophosphate and products resulting of their decomposition.
The aroma precursors are of three main types: lipids (oxidation/degradation), peptides, amino acids, sugars and ribonucleotides (thermal degradation and interactions) and thiamine (thermal degradation). However, reaction products also acts as reactants, so the end result is a complex network of intertwining reactions.
In meat foodstuffs cystein, cystine and methionine are the most prominent precursors generating sulfur containing aroma and flavour components. Most of this components exhibit very low thresholds and cooked or roasted meat odour qualities, changing to sulfur notes or thiamin-like odours at higher concentrations.(Tressl,1990)
In the following figure, sulfur components from cystine, thiamine, glutamate, and ascorbic acid models systems, contributing to meat flavour, are shown.
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The flavour of boiled meat is mainly characterized by 2-methyl-3-furanthiol, bis-(2-methil - 3-furyl) disulphide and 2-furfurylthiol (Grosch et al., 1990)
They were made several models to simulate meat flavour, one of this models is presented by MacLeod, 1986:
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