Measurement of colour stability of cooked cured meats to light and air II.—Testing the procedure

A procedure is presented for estimating the colour stability of cooked cured meats to light and air. The colour stability is recorded as the % change in the ratio of the reflectance at 540 and 560 mμ (R540/560) on 30 minutes illumination in air. The method gave satisfactory results in practice; the reproducibility between two adjacent slices of the same muscle was found to be 2.0% with a total standard deviation of 1.3%. The main disadvantage with the method was that intramuscular fat was found to interfere with the results, causing a reduced % change in R540/560 in the samples in which it occurred.