Formulation and Development of a Ham with Incorporating Mushroom for Better Utilization and Value Addition

Abstract

Due to emerging food crisis result with the increase of cost of living, so people are towards more cost effective, easy and nutritional food products with concerned about food safety. Therefore many value added products have been introduced to the food market. Ham is processed cured value added meat product of pork. It has high market value. At present the local market price of one kilo of ham is more than Rs.1000. The cost of production can be reduced only by replacing pork with other food ingredient such as mushroom. Mushroom has low market price compared to meat and it is an underutilized food product free from cholesterol and has low the market value. It would be a good preservation method increase the self life of the mushrooms. Therefore this research was directed to reduce the cost of production of pork ham and increase the self life of the mushroom by processing the mushroom incorporated pork ham. Three ham samples were prepared with three different mushroom proportions and named as Sample codes - 713, 825 & 972. The sensory evaluation was carried out using untrained 30 sensory panelists. The three samples were evaluated using 7- point hedonic scale subjectively and analyzed using the MINITAB statistical analysis package according to the Freidman test at 5 % level of significance. According to the statistical evaluation 825 sample was selected as the best sample, containing 60% to 40% pork and mushroom respectively. It is shown production of pork ham can be alternated with mushrooms successfully without reducing it nutritional and organoleptic quality.