Effects of high-pressure/enzymatic hydrolysis/flash extraction on the taste compounds of Jinhua ham bone

Dry-cured ham processing generates huge amounts of byproducts including bones, meat trimmings and skins resulting from both trimming and deboning during the processing of meat products. This waste represents a high cost for the meat processing sector and a serious environmental problem. As a result, meat processing industries are making a strong effort to convert wastes and by-products into useful products for animal feeds, human foods, pharmaceutical products, fertilisers and biodiesel generation. So far, there have been many reports on the deep processing of fresh bone, but there is a lack of research on the ham bone. As we all known, the flavor and nutritional content of ham bone has been changed after pickling. Although the bones can release nutrients when cooking, they are not suitable for direct use in traditional cooking because of their high salt content. Their costs can be balanced through innovation to generate added value products that increase its profitability.This experiment was performed to study the effect of different extraction methods on the release of taste compounds in Jinhua ham bone, three different extraction methods including high-pressure, enzyme treatment, flash extraction and their synthesis were employed. Descriptive sensory analysis was applied to investigate variations of the taste attributes. The composition and content of soluble sugar, organic acid, nucleotide and free amino acid were detected by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). At last, partial least squares regression (PLSR) was performed to determine the correlations among the sensory attributes and taste compounds. The sensory analysis results indicated that the sample treated by high-pressure had stronger umami and salty attribute, the sample by enzyme treatment had the strongest sweetness and sourness attribute, and flash extraction treatment gave the most bitterness. Also, the highest acceptability score was shown in the high-pressure treatment sample. It was found that the content of all taste substances in the original sample was the lowest, and the total soluble sugar content was the highest in the sample treated with high-pressure complex enzyme hydrolysis. Compared with other treatments, the organic acid content of the sample after enzymatic hydrolysis increased significantly (P<0.05). Similarly, the total amount of 5 '-nucleotides and free amino acids increased significantly (P<0.05) after the sample was processed, and the highest content was found in high-pressure treatment. The PLSR results showed that there were significant differences (P<0.05) between the samples, the distribution rules of taste substances released by different treatment methods were significantly different. Among which high-pressure sample had significant correlation with umami and salty attribute (P<0.05), and enzyme treatment sample was positively correlated with sweetness and sourness due to high amount of glucose, malic acid, citric acid, cysteine and lysine, while the other processed samples had weak correlation with sensory attributes and taste substances. In general, different treatment of jinhua ham bone has different flavor, its flavor characteristics are related to a variety of substances. The results of this study can provide some references for the improvement of fragrant quality in ham bone and increased the added value of ham bone.