Journal of Aquaculture Research & Development

Abstract

Storage and Microbial Evaluation of Black Pepper Pre-Treated Oven- Dried Moon Fish (Citharinus citharus Geoffery Saint-Hilaire 1809)

Agbabiaka LA, Kuforiji OA and Ndumnigwe OE

The storage and microbial evaluation of black pepper (Piper guineese) pre-treated oven-dried moon fish (Citharinus citharus) stored at an ambient temperature were studied. Thirty six (36) freshly caught moon fish weighing between 850-900 g were purchased, killed, eviscerated and rinsed thoroughly under tap water and were divided into 3 treatments of 12 fish in each. The first treatment was immersed in 3% brine without black pepper extract served as control, the second treatment was soaked in mixture of 3% brine and 1.5% black pepper extract while the third sample was immersed in 3% brine and 3% black pepper extract tagged MFSA, MFSB and MFSC respectively. Each treatment fish were soaked in the respective solutions for 30minutes prior to been oven- dried using gas as energy for 5hours at the temperature range of 80°C-90°C. After drying, samples were allowed to cool at room temperature in separately labelled clean trays and subsequently stored in the quality control room for 7 days to determine the storage and microbial characteristics. Processed fish samples were subjected to microbial analysis of which results revealed that the (control) MFSA had the highest microbial count of 17.2 x 105 followed by 10.8 x 105 and 9.6 x 105 for MFSB and MFSC respectively. Also, the microbial analysis showed that MFSA favour the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, while Klebsiella spp. and Bacillus spp. were identified for MFSB and MFSC respectively. These results therefore, indicated that the use of 3% brine with black pepper at 1.5% and 3% concentration could have caused reduction of microbial load of oven- dried fish and improve its shelf-life