Analysis of sulfur compounds from the in-oven roast beef aroma by comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography

After a previous investigation of carbonyl compounds in the in-oven top note of roast beef [S. Rochat, A. Chaintreau, J. Agric. Food Chem. 53 (2005) 9578], this paper focuses on the role of sulfur compounds. Because of the complexity of the roast beef headspace where sulfur compounds occur in trace amounts, a high resolution and sensitive technique, comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC × GC), was chosen, that allowed the detection of thousands of compounds in the oven headspace. As identifying all of them would be too time consuming, a strategy had to be developed to extract the pertinent information. More than 70 sulfur compounds were found by GC × GC hyphenated to time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS), and the identity of 50 of them was confirmed. To overcome the absence of many retention indices in databanks, the missing values were simulated using a multiple linear regression to help the peak identification. The selection of the most important sulfur odorants from this list was achieved by GC–olfactometry, using the GC-“SNIF” technique. Seven compounds have been found for the first time in beef aroma, of which only one has been previously found in nature.