Safety of processed meat products is one of the challenging issues for the food processing industry. Meat is a perishable commodity and can be spoiled easily from microbial growth as well as chemical deterioration. To enhance the safety and shelf life, synthetic additives are used for maintaining quality of processed meat products. As, these synthetic additives pose toxic and carcinogenic health hazards to human therefore, consumers demand safe, natural and healthy alternatives of these synthetic counterparts. Herbs and spices have ability to act as source of ntural antioxidant & antimicrobial agent and licorice is among one of them. Hypothesis of this study was that added licorice extract can improve the antioxidant as well as microbial safety of meat patties at various storage intervals.
In present study, commercially available chicken meat used to prepare meat patties and licorice extract were used in different treatments during mincing. After product development, patties were cooked followed by storage at refrigeration temperature for analysis at 0, 3rd and 7th day of storage. Lipid oxidation, quality parameters, sensory evaluation and microbial analysis were conducted for detection of oxidation and storage stability. The data was analyzed through two factor Analysis of variance using 2 factor factorial design was applied. ANOVA test was used to estimate the significance of results. Tuckey test was used for the comparison of the Means as per requirements using SPSS software to estimate the level of significance.
The results of study explored that licorice is beneficial for inhibiting the oxidation in chicken meat patties as results of TBARS showed significance difference among control, BHT and licorice enriched treatment samples. Also the T4 (Group containing 1 g/kg of licorice extract and T5 (Group containing 1.25 g/kg of licorice extract) showed most promising results regarding
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the antioxidant activity in chicken meat patties. Similarly, current study showed the efficacy of licorice against bacteria. Specially the T4 (Group containing 1 g/kg of licorice extract and T5 (Group containing 1.25 g/kg of licorice extract) and Results of Total Plate count showed positive results as an antibacterial agent in chicken meat patties. While the color of chicken meat patties (parameters L*, b* and a*) was estimated using minolta meter and as expected the results of T4 (Group containing 1 g/kg of licorice extract and T5 (Group containing 1.25 g/kg of licorice extract) was more redish and little light as compared to the control sapmle containing no antioxidant. Sensory evaluation of chicken meat showed that overall acceptability of chicken meat patties containing the licorice extract in high dose as in T4 (Group containing 1 g/kg of licorice extract and T5 (Group containing 1.25 g/kg of licorice extract) had highest values compared to the control and BHT containing chicken meat patties.
Outcomes and suggestions
The utilization of licorice extract as a source of natural antioxidant as well as antimicrobial agent in processed chicken meat products. It provides the estimation of the optimum dose of licorice extract to be used in meat products for safety enhancement and storage stability of products. Also, it provide a natural way to increase the stability and safety of meat based products as well as to check food safety concerns but also enhance the protection against spoilage as well as pathogenic bacteria in meat.