Sensory Characteristics of Spanish “Serrano” Dry‐cured Ham

A specific descriptive lexicon has been developed to evaluate the flavor of Spanish “Serrano” dry‐cured ham. Dry‐curing of pork legs produces a unique flavor difficult to define in regular meat terms. This lexicon for the flavor of dry‐cured ham may be used by researchers to study flavor‐development during the curing process. In this paper we have applied the lexicon to the study of dry‐cured flavor developed in two different manufacturing processes that differ only in the length of the drying stage. The long processed dry‐cured ham (12 months) is stronger for 8 of the 16 sensory attributes studied than the short processed dry‐cured ham (7 months). During the long curing process of the ripening‐drying stage, we found that the typical dry‐cured flavor developed was defined by three factors: “cured flavor,”“off‐flavor” and “pork flavor,” whereas in the short curing process typical dry‐cured flavor was not fully developed.