The Effect of the Boar Taint Masking Strategy (Adding Dried or on Sensory Characteristics.

With increasing efforts to ban surgical castration, it is important to find ways to mask the level of boar taint in meat. The aim of this study was to test the possibility of masking boar taint or skatole levels by adding dried or and to evaluate consumer sensory preferences towards the skatole concentration in different carcass parts (; ; neck chop and subcutaneous fat) and the masking strategy (addition of or ). In the first experiment, the effect of the masking strategy was evaluated at three different skatole concentrations (0.069, 0.269 and 0.463 µg/g). The results showed that the samples with low and medium skatole levels were significantly different between the control group and the groups treated with or . In both cases, the addition of and had a positive effect on the parameters of abnormal odour and pleasantness of odour ( < 0.05). According to the results of the second experiment, meat samples from leaner parts, such as the neck chop and , not treated with and for masking, were significantly ( < 0.05) worse in terms of the occurrence of boar taint or abnormal odour than the masked samples. No significant differences were found between the two masking methods.