Research Progress on Novel Salt Reduction Strategy and Mechanism of Dry-cured Ham

Dry-cured ham, one of delicious food with unique flavor and rich cultural heritage, is preferred by consumers and becomes a favorite food on people's table. However, since high salt content threatens people's health, it has seriously brought about hindering the development of ham industry. It has become the focus of people's attention to reduce the salt content of ham under the premise of ensuring the quality and safety of dry-cured ham. In this paper, several common and novel salt reduction strategies, which can potentially influence on the quality of low-sodium dry-cured ham, include sodium salt substitute, flavor enhancer, physical form modification of salt, salty peptide, and mediated curing techniques including not only physical mediation: vacuum, ultrasonic, ultra-high pressure, and pulsed electric field technology, but also exogenous mediations: adding exogenous substances such as sugar and polyhydroxyl alcohol and their mechanism of salt reduction are reviewed. It also compares the advantages and disadvantages of each salt reduction strategy and suggests that it still has certain limitations to produce ham by a single salt reduction method, the combination of multiple methods is thus a more effective way to achieve salt reduction. This paper aims to provide new insight and theoretical references for the production of low-sodium dry-cured ham with high quality and safety.