Avaliação da eficiência da aplicação do ozônio na cadeia de produção do queijo minas frescal

Abstract

Milk, as a complete and nutritious food, is highly consumed worldwide, both in its direct ingestion and through its derivatives. Many actions are put into practice to ensure its quality, since health care of the dairy cattle to the use of treatments to ensure a longer shelf life of dairy products. Ozone has been studied nowadays in the food industry and was used in liquid and gaseous forms as sanitizer for the experiments described here. This study tried to evaluate the effectiveness of ozone application in the dairy industry, analyzing its characteristics according to: the teat skin disinfection before milking the cows, microbial inactivation in raw milk, stability increase of minas frescal cheese, equipment, maturation and coldstorage sanitizing. The sanitizer was used in liquid form (ozonated water) at a concentration of 2.0 mg L -1 for the teat skin sanitizing studies and to immerse the minas frescal cheese; and gaseous form for bubbling milk and cold chamber sanitizing, at concentrations of 1.5 and 0.03 mg L -1 , respectively. It was considered completely randomized design and the data were evaluated for normality of residuals and homogeneity of variances. The mesophilic aerobic microorganisms and Staphylococcus sp. on the teat skin had reductions of 2.36 and 2.03 logarithmic cycles, for chlorhexidine and 2.52 and 1.99 logcycles for ozonated water, respectively. For these treatments, statistically significant differences were not observed (P> 0.05). The Enterobacteriacea had reductions of 1.16 and 1.50 logarithmic cycles for chlorhexidine and ozonated water, and these treatments showed statistically significant differences (P<0.05).The ozone sanitizer at a concentration of 1.5 mg L -1 and exposure time of 15 minutes showed reductions of 0.61, 0.97, 0.13, 1.04 and 0.48 logarithmic cycles, respectively, for the mesophilic aerobic microorganisms, psychotropic, Enterobacteriaceae and Staphylococcusp., molds and yeast in the raw milk. We did not observe the presence of Enterobacteriaceae, total coliforms, thermotolerants and Staphylococcus spp. in the minas frescal cheese samples analyzed.The decimal reductions for the populations of aerobic mesophiles,lactic bacteria, yeasts and molds in the minas frescal cheese, immediately after the application of ozonated water at a concentration of 2.0 mg.L -1 for 2 minutes were 1, 53, 1.90 and 2.34 log-cycles, respectively. There was a reduction of mesophilic aerobic, yeast and mold of 0.81 and 1.01 logcycles, respectively, in the minas frescal cheese cold storage and maturation, after application of ozone gas concentration of 0.03 mg.L -1 .