Application of the systematic approach to food engineering systems (SAFES) methodology to the salting and drying of a meat product: Tasajo

Tasajo is a salted meat-based product made in Cuba, as a version of charqui, a traditional product consumed in many South American countries. Traditionally, meat is salted and afterwards sun dried, this is a long process which takes three weeks at least. In the industry, salting is done in two steps, first a wet salting step and afterwards a dry salting step. It is important to know the amount of salt and water in the final product in order to predict the spoilage of the product, the gaining of weight for financial considerations, etc. Safes methodology allows the analysis of different elements in a system: the components, phases and states of aggregation in the food during the different stages in the process, in order to understand these with a suitable level of complexity. It also analyzes the transport functions, chemical reactions and the phenomena occurring during the processing of the product. Using this methodology, shrinkage of cells has been found to be very similar to water loss in intracellular phase (48%). In this study, water and salt mass transfers during all the steps of the salting process have been quantified, pointing up and quantifying the changes in the state of aggregation of some components occurring in each step.