ABSTRACT
In the last decade, consumers’ interest in snack foods made of different types of meats, fish and crustaceans has grown. This tendency has been encouraged by the recommendations made by dietitians to ingest higher amounts of proteins while reducing levels of carbohydrates like the Atkins, paleo, and ketogenic diets. The focus of snacks produced from animal and marine sources is to improve the quality and stability of traditional meat snacks or to launch novel products with enhanced sensory properties, nutritional value, and functional attributes with more convenient packaging. Most of these snacks are preserved by lowering Aw, pH, and/or supplementation of curing salts and preservatives via dehydration, salting, fermentation, and smoking or by the combination of these technologies employed for many centuries. Dehydrated products, fermented sausages, dry-cured hams, and smoked meats have prolonged shelf-life at room temperature. One of the most popular animal-based snacks are pork rinds and cracklings, which are produced from raw pork skins that are cut into pellets and then normally expanded in a deep-fat fryer. The resulting pork rinds are mainly composed of protein from connective tissue (collagen and elastin) and fat absorbed during frying. The popularity of these snacks has grown due to the adoption of low-carbohydrates diets. The industry today focuses on the development of ready-to-eat and innovative snacks with reduced fat, cholesterol, and sodium or by supplementation of lipids with improved fatty acid profile, fiber sources, or probiotics. This chapter covers the features and production of shelf-stable animal, poultry, and marine foods.
