Why do deli cold cuts get slimey?
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See https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/why-does-deli-meat-get-slimy-shiny
> According to Ray Rastelli Jr., butcher and president of the Rastelli Foods Group, “The large majority of ‘deli-style’ meats are products that are typically made using beef, pork, chicken or turkey meats as the foundation for the end product,” he says. “However, they also carry ‘added-ingredients,’ also known as a value-added product, which can produce the ‘slime’ you’re seeing.”
> These added ingredients — which Rastelli says are known in the food industry as an “injection, stitch pump, additives or flavors” — are typically added to the blocks of meat that your cold cuts are sliced off from. The idea is that these additives will make the meat more commercially appealing, in terms of taste, texture and appearance. They can include natural or artificial flavorings; dextrose (which is a fancy way of saying sugar); carrageenan (which is a thickener and gelling agent); food starches, which can make meat look plumper; as well as salt and other sodium phosphates for taste, which for ham often means sodium nitrates and sodium erythorbate.
> Rastelli says that the slime is caused by these added ingredients as they begin to dissolve and start to leak out of the cold cuts. “There isn’t a scientifically established time as to how and when this process occurs, but it usually starts once the initial package is opened and the meat is sliced,” says Rastelli. “The whole, unsliced initial product literally encases these added ingredients, so once opened and sliced, the dissolved ingredients that were injected into the meat originally now have a mode to leak out of the product.”
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