They sell the best white-label Iberian ham from Auchan and in Alcampo. According to the latest analysis by the OCU, sliced ​​”Iberian feed 50% Iberian food” and at 42.30 Euros a kilo is (by far) the best product in terms of quality/price. Interestingly, this type of in-depth analysis is gaining incredible attention among consumers, even though it may seem like just another ranking as for the best milk in Spain a few weeks ago. Increasingly.

What’s the meal? One of the most talked about topics in recent years has been “the future of food”. What if it’s substitute shakes, fakes, insects for human consumption, or steaks grown in a fermentation tank. One way or another, it’s a long list of products trying to rethink what we do. food

And yet, we don’t fully understand today’s food. This seems to be the biggest challenge right now. Food has been flooded with big corporations trying to homogenize diets around the world by going to countless gurus playing around with definitions according to the time of day. This is why going to the supermarket every day becomes more complex (and systems to simplify it are stuck in ministries).

How do we know that we are eating healthy, cheap and quality foods? This gets even more serious when we talk about the crown of national nutrition. Let’s remember that Nutriscore scores olive oil very poorly, and the “anti-process fever” puts Iberian ham in a very bad place: both fat and ham scored worse than Chocapic.

Therefore, seeing analysis as OCU does, it is inevitable to wonder if there are truly objective criteria for judging which products are better, or if it’s all just a more or less detailed marketing act after all. So, how do we know if the ham is good? Can we guess the quality of the ham?

It’s not a matter of taste… A few years ago, Isabel Revilla, professor of food technology at the University of Salamanca, asked herself the same question. Above all, he was interested in finding a scientific procedure that could somehow combine subjective and objective criteria. In his approach, Revilla noticed that professional tasters used a chart of 28 parameters divided into four large blocks: appearance (marbling, greasy colour, color uniformity, color intensity, sweating and white spots), odor (density, toughened, porky, rancid, foul). aroma), flavor (density, fat density, hardened, salty, sweet, sour, rancid aged, aftertaste, off-flavor) and texture (firmness, juiciness, oiliness, fibrousness, chewiness, chewiness, heterogeneity, and residue).

With this knowledge and the help of an artificial neural network, he wondered if the quality of a slice of ham could be judged without even handling it: just by photographic analysis. Their results were that not only were sensory parameters predictable, but the results were very similar to those of professional tasters. In other words, the senses effectively function as high-quality tools.

How do we bring this into our home? The truth is it’s not easy. For now, because even for experts, choosing a good ham just by sight is complicated. There are simple things like observing that the color of the slice is uniform (the presence of darker and lighter areas indicates poor curing); but unfortunately that doesn’t reach all the organoleptic aspects of ham.

Beyond a uniform color and a pleasant scent, many consumers pay attention to the nail. However, you have to be careful here, there are more breeds of pigs that are morphologically or chromatically similar to pigs of the Iberian breed, if not the Iberian breed. The condition of Duroc with the black hoof is well known. That’s why experts insist that the key element is the label.

Image | JPellgen