Quality and Shelf Life Assessment of Ready to Cook Fish Products During Storage at Different Freezing Temperature

Abstract

It was aimed to investigate the sensory, bio-chemical, nutritional and microbiological quality related changes of some selected fish species namely tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus), parse (Liza parsia) and rui (Labeo rohita), and it’s processed Ready to cook (RTC) products during storage at variable freezing conditions. Sensory, biochemical, nutritional and bacteriological quality related changes of RTC products prepared from tilapia, parse and rui fish were determined during a storage period of 08 weeks (56 days) at two different freezing temperatures viz., -5°C and -18°C. Quality attributes determined in this study included sensory scores, pH, TMA-N, TVB-N, protein, lipid, moisture, ash, total viable count (TVC), sulfur producing bacteria (SPB) count and Pseudomonas bacteria count. All of the quality attributes were found to be very low in amount or its changes occurred slowly that were the indicative fresh product during the storage period. Therefore, tilapia, parse and rui can be kept in freezer at -5°C and -18°C for with little quality changes at least 56 days. Based on the quality changes during freezing at those temperatures, 1-3 years of shelf life can be attained.