Influence of brine concentration on swelling pressure of pork meat throughout salting.

Abstract The influence of sodium chloride on the water holding capacity of meat is well known and described in literature. An increase in water holding capacity is associated with an increase in the swelling pressure in the protein matrix. A novel device was used to measure the swelling pressure during brine salting of muscle cylinders (40 × 50 mm), in different NaCl brine concentrations (2.5 to 25%) over 6 days at 4 °C. Changes in meat composition, weight and height of non-constrained control samples were also measured. The aim of this work was to prove the feasibility of using the developed device in order to quantify the influence of the brine concentration on the magnitude of the swelli…