Pre-cooked pork and poultry products contribute more than $6 billion to the meat industry in the US, and are traditionally manufactured and stored as frozen products. One of the major concerns by meat processors about pre-cooked products is their high susceptibility to lipid oxidation. The development of off-flavors, such as warmed-over flavor (WOF), from lipid oxidation limits the shelf-life of these products to less than 6 mo. To retard lipid oxidation, synthetic antioxidants such as butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) are added to increase shelf-life. With the increasing demand for more natural products, recent research has shown that sorghum bran is a quality inhibitor of lipid oxidation. We analyzed sorghum bran as an antioxidant by adding 0.25%, 0.5% and 0.75% of either Sumac or Black, high tannin sorghum bran to pre-cooked sausage patties, bratwurst and pre-cooked turkey patties, and 0.25% and 0.5% to dark meat chicken nuggets. A negative control (no antioxidants added) and two positive controls (0.02% BHA/BHT and 0.2% rosemary extract) were added to the study. Products were manufactured and stored on Styrofoam trays over-wrapped with polyvinyl chloride film at 4?C for 0, 1, 3 and 5 d of storage and re-heated to 70?C and served to a trained sensory panel on d 1 and d 3 to test descriptive flavor attributes. Thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) were used to evaluate lipid oxidation. Descriptive sensory traits were not affected (P > 0.05) by antioxidant treatments. No antioxidant treatment effects (P > 0.05) were found in chicken nuggets, bratwurst or pre-cooked sausage patties for TBARS, but the addition of sorghum bran to turkey patties yielded similar or lower (P < 0.05) TBARS values than BHA/BHT. These results suggest that high tannin sorghum bran can be used as an effective antioxidant without negatively affecting sensory flavor attributes.
