Slice-cured meat

B. CHINESE AND MALAYSIAN IM MEATS 1. Slice-Cured Chinese and Indonesian (Dending) Products... 

Meats. Thinly sliced generally is best. Roasted meats such as turkey, ham, and beef are favorites, as are cured meats such as salami and mortadella. Try grilled steak, pork chops, or chicken breast, sliced horizontally with a sharp knife, for a variation. (A sandwich is an excellent use for leftovers.)... 

A high proportion of pork is pickled in brine and smoked, to make ham or bacon. The original process was to immerse the meat in a tank of cold brine for a period. A quicker method is to inject the cold pickle with hypodermic needles into the cuts. Smoking is carried out at around 52°C, so the cured bacon must be cooled again for slicing, packing and storage. 

Reyes-Cano etal. (1995) have described the process utilized in production of cecina—an IM meat product that is widely produced and consumed in Mexico. Fresh lean beef from the hindquarter is sliced parallel to the direction of the muscle fibers in long strips at a thickness of about 5 mm and immersed in a 15% salt solution at a ratio of 1 2 meat to solution for 4 hr. The meat then can be dried by oven drying at 50°C for 1 hr or sun dried for several days. Still another procedure adds salt to the thinly sliced meat and folds the meat over the salt until curing is complete. The final product has an a of about 0.85 and is similar in composition to beef jerky (Reyes-Cano et al, 1994). The final pH is about 5.4 to 5.5 (Reyes-Cano et al, 1995). 

Gou, P. et al (2013) Feasibility of NIR interactance hyperspectral imaging for on-line measurement of crude composition in vacuum packed dry-cured ham slices. Meat Sci., 95 (2), 250-255. 

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