Optimization of the addition of carrot dietary fibre to a dry fermented sausage (sobrassada) using artificial neural networks

Eim Valeria S., Simal Florindo Susana, Rossello Matas Carmen, Femenia Marroig Antoni, Bon Corbín José

2013

Meat Science

An optimisation problem was formulated to maximise the amount of carrot dietary fibre (CDF) in a dry fermented sausage, while maintaining product quality, by using 0–12% CDF as the decision variable, and limiting values of several physico-chemical and textural parameters (moisture content, water activity, pH, colour, non-protein nitrogen, free fatty acid, compression work and hardness) as constraints. The evolution of each quality parameter during the ripening process was estimated by developing a multi-layer feed forward artificial neural network (ANN), taking into consideration the CDF concentration and the ripening time as independent variables. Results indicate an optimum CDF concentration of 4.9% with a good correlation between experimental and estimated values (mean relative error ≤ 3.35%).