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The diversity of traditional food products passes down from one generation to another, and contributes to the formation of the cultural identity and gastronomic patrimony. The know-how employed and the variety of preparation techniques reflect the origins, and the references of consumers. This study aims to detail the different steps and practices used by Tunisian women during preparation of the traditional salted and dried meat product known as "kaddid", and to study its physicochemical and microbial properties. For this purpose, 400 women were interviewed in 8 regions of Tunisia. The results of this survey described the different traditional Tunisian processes, and recipes used for the preparation of kaddid. The outcomes highlighted significant differences in the preparation of kaddid between regions. Kaddid can be made from sheep (89% of respondents), beef (22% of respondents), camel or goat (3% of respondents) and various parts may be used depending on the local food habits. 70% of the interviewed used dry salting combined with seasoning as salting mode. After sun drying, kaddid is frozen until use or traditionally preserved through post-processing steps which consist of frying then storing in sealed jars filled with olive oil (31% according to the respondents) or simply at room temperature in hermetically sealed glass jars. In order to study the physicochemical and microbial characteristics of kaddid, a sample was prepared based on the results of the survey, according to the most commonly used recipe. The pH (5.77±0.03), water activity (0.54±0.001), and moisture (23.67±0.17) values were considered suitable for the safety and stability of the product. The lipid oxidation rate of kaddid expressed in terms of TBARS (0.55±0.02 mg MDA/kg) content was much lower than the upper limit of rancidity (2mg MDA/kg). The results showed a significant effect of the kaddid processing on reducing the initial microbial load of raw meat (p<0.05). The microbiological characterization showed that molds, yeasts, and Staphylococcus presented the dominant population, while Lactic bacteria was present in low numbers in kaddid samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aimed to study the effect of three drying methods, namely sun-drying (SD) (T = 32 °C), continuous convective drying (CCD) (T = 35 ± 2 °C) and interval starting accessibility Drying (ISAD) (T = 35 ± 2 °C) with an active time of 30 s (t on ) and a tempering time of 60 s (t off ), on selected quality characteristics of a traditional dry-salted meat product known as "kaddid". The analyses of chemical composition, lipid oxidation and fatty acid profile of kaddid were carried out before and after 45 days of storage (t = 0 vs. t = 45) at ambient temperature. Chemical composition and lipid oxidation (TBARS) of kaddid were affected by the drying methods. The CCD samples showed the lowest level of lipid oxidation. Protein content was better preserved via the ISAD method (7.27 g/kg DM). The fatty acid profile revealed the lowest mono-unsaturated fatty acid content in the ISAD samples; however, no significant difference was observed between the drying processes for the total poly-unsaturated fatty acid content. The storage period led to a significant decrease in the SFA values of CCD and ISAD samples against an increase in the MUFA ones. ISAD appeared to be a promising drying mode with a lower effective drying time and a good product quality preservation.

Background: An approach based on QR decomposition, to remove speckle noise from medical ultrasound images, is presented in this paper., Methods: The speckle noisy image is segmented into small overlapping blocks. A global covariance matrix is calculated by averaging the corresponding covariances of the blocks. QR decomposition is applied to the global covariance matrix. To filter out speckle noise, the first subset of orthogonal vectors of the Q matrix is projected onto the signal subspace. The proposed approach is compared with five benchmark techniques; Homomorphic Wavelet Despeckling (HWDS), Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion (SRAD), Frost, Kuan and Probabilistic Non-Local Mean (PNLM)., Results and Conclusion: When applied to different simulated and real ultrasound images, the QR based approach has secured maximum despeckling performance while maintaining optimal resolution and edge detection, and that is regardless of image size or nature of speckle; fine or rough., (Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.)