Toward the prediction of the PSE-like muscle defect in cooked hams

Pale Soft Exudative (PSE)-like muscle defect is of great importance in the cooked ham industry because of the economic losses it can cause. The flagship product is the “Jambon superieur,” a polyphosphate-free cooked ham, usually sold sliced and packaged. Slicing is an automatic process that reveals the defect as holes in the slice leading to slicing losses. Up to now, the PSE-like defect has only been detected on raw meat after deboning the pork leg because it affects the inner part of the semimembranosus muscles and also the adductor muscles. The objective of this study was to develop innovative approaches that combine mechanistic elucidation and the discovery of potential biomarkers (i) at the level of the muscle and (ii) at the level of the live animal by analyzing proteins from plasma. The use of chemometrics for the spectral fingerprinting of pig plasma was chosen to predict the PSE-like muscle defect in raw hams.