Características sensoriais de enchidos e queijos tradicionais

Mestrado em Engenharia Alimentar - Instituto Superior de AgronomiaSensory analysis is being increasingly used by the food industry, a science that uses man and his senses to measure sensorial characteristics (and acceptability criteria) of food products. The main objective of this work was to use of sensory analysis to characterize traditional meat products (sausages) and cheeses. There are several definitions of traditional products. According to Commission Regulation (EC) Nº 509/2006 of 20 March 2007 a product is designated as traditional when it has "proven usage on the Community market for a time period showing transmission between generations; this time period should be the one generally ascribed to one human generation, at least 25 years". Cheese is a fresh or aged product, with different styles and textures. It is obtained from milk (full or skimmed), cream, buttermilk, or a mixture of these products, including whey. Sausages are cured meat products, made from meat, entrails, spices and additives. They can undergo a period of maturation and cure, including smoking. For the cheese analysis, a descriptive test was performed, with a certain number of attributes. A frequency table was built, from which different cheese definitions were evaluated, identical to the existing ones. Two statistical methods were used: hierarchical classification and principal component analysis. With the hierarchical classification, the cheeses were grouped in four groups, nine, seven, five and three. The cheeses "Picante da Beira-Baixa DOP" and "Terrincho Velho DOP" are located in isolated groups. The cheese "Amarelo da Beira Baixa DOP" was found not isolated only in group of three. With nine and seven groups the cheeses "Amanteigado de Seia", "Castelo Branco", "Serra da Estrela" and "Azeitão" formed a subgroup showing that the evaluators probably used the same descriptors based on the same properties, the look of the crust, form, height, taste and aroma. With only five groups, a very heterogeneous sub-group was formed, that could be divided in three. "Azeitão DOP", "Castelo Branco DOP", "Amanteigado de Seia", "Serra da Estrela DOP" and "Serpa DOP" would form a group while "Nisa DOP", "Mestiço de Tolosa IGP", "Mistura" and "Castelo Branco DOP" would form another, as the characteristics of these subgroups are similar. "Flamengo" would be in a separate group as its characteristics are very different from the other analyzed cheeses. This separate group probably originated in the discrepancy of the results, as no common descriptor would be clearly different from the others. Principal component analysis was used to study groupings of similar sample types, and it was shown that the first three main components justify 54% of the variance. The is a low value, with the first six principal components we could explain 83% of the variance, but in this work we used the first three principal components. The first two correlated with the crust properties, consistency and texture and the third with taste and aroma. It was shown that "Picante da Beira Baixa DOP" was distinct from the other cheeses. It should be noted that "Serpa DOP" was far-off the other soft cheeses. For the sausages a hedonic scale was used, with a t test and the samples showed no significant differences (when ItstatI> Tcrit to p