Evaluation of the safety quality of a Portuguese traditional fermented sausage along processing

Linguiça is a Portuguese dry-fermented sausage, which has been found to harbour food-borne pathogens in the past. Hence, the objective of this study was to investigate the changes in the levels of total viable counts (TVC), Enterobacteriaceae, L. monocytogenes and S. aureus at the key production stages of linguiça. Overall, TVC counts did not change considerably from raw meat to stuffing (5.5 5.9 log CFU/g), yet it increased significantly up to the end of drying (7.83 log CFU/g). Unlike the Enterobacteriaceae counts, which decreased (p