Research of influence of ultrasound treatment in various liquid media on the surface microflora of semifinished meat

In order to prevent microbial spoilage, meat and meat products could be treatedusing different types of processing. However, these methods do not ensures sterilization and can cause decrease of nutrition and biological value of food product. In this regardstudying of the innovative methods, that guaranteeing consumers safe and minimally-processed foods, is particularly relevant. The addition of lactic acid bacteria and ultrasound (US) treatment have great potential in this direction.Thesurfacemicroflorainvestigations of semifinished meat products were carried out in order to state the positive influence on their microbiological stability by US treatment in different types of medium. Experiments included the study of antagonistic activity of bacteria strains of the genus Lactobacillus acidophilus(L. acidophilus) in relation to typical microflora representatives of chilled meat semi-finished products. Basing on these experiments the strain 7m13 of L. acidophilus with the highest inhibitory activity was chosen. The lowest inhibitory activity was found for strain 5e. The parameters of ultrasonic treatment was established as follows: installed capacity of the treatment 350 Wt with the exposure time 2 minutes, avoiding undesired denaturation changes of muscle proteins. The handling of check samples included the following variants: control (without treatment); sample 1 – treatment in distilled water; sample 2 – treatment in milk whey; sample 3 – treatment in fermented milk whey. As the result of experiments it was found, that the strain 7m13 of L.acidophilus showed the highest antagonistic activity against used test cultures of bacteria. The quantitative and qualitative composition of the surface microflora of the check samples is not constant; coccal forms are less sensitive for ultrasound treatment in comparison with bacilli and yeast cells. The minimal surface microbial population was shown using the combination of fermented milk whey and ultrasound treatment.