Influence of natural antioxidants on the quality indicators and storage life of semi-finished horse meat products

Horse meat and its products can be considered a food with high nutritional value. Doing so may result in fire or electric shock. Horsemeat consumption is marginal when compared with other conventional types of meat such as beef, chicken or pork, which are much more important in the human diet. Horsemeat has excellent nutritional properties, i.e. it is of low fat, rich in iron and it has a favorable dietetic fatty acid profile with a high content of unsaturated fatty acids and vitamin B. The article presents data on the influence of natural antioxidants - dihydroquercetin, ascorbic acid and tocopherol - on the stability of the properties of horse fats during storage. As the material for the research we used horse fat with dihydroquercetin 0.01%, 0.025%, 0.05%, 0.75% together with the addition of ascorbic acid and tocopherol in dosages of 0.05% and 0.02% by weight of the raw material. During the research, generally accepted methods were used to study the development of oxidative spoilage by determining the acid, peroxide and thiobarbituric values. Studies have shown that the inhibitory properties of dihydroquercetin directly depend on its concentration: the higher the proportion of dihydroquercetin in the product, the slower the oxidation process. In addition, the obtained data showed that the use of dihydroquercetin in combination with tocopherol and ascorbic acid reduces the accumulation of primary fat oxidation products.