Description
Asiago PDO cheese can be produced as Pressato, with 2 months of ripening, or Allevo, with a maturation of more than 6 months to favor stronger and composite aroma. Recently, to catch new market segments, cheese factories have started to produce a new type of Asiago named fresh Allevo with a shorter ripening time. Thus, to avoid frauds, there is a need to develop rapid methods for cheese variety assessment. For this purpose, three raw entire milk bulks were pro-cessed according to the PDO Asiago specification to produce Pressato (2-mo of ripening, n = 28 ), fresh Allevo (4-mo of ripening, n = 30) or Allevo (6-mo of ripening, n = 20). NIR spectral data were recorded in triplicate by a Foss DS2500 scanning monochromator (Foss NIR-System, Hillerød, DK) on cheese ground samples. To assess the correct classification of the cheese variety, a PLS-DA (PLS Toolbox, Eigen. Res., Inc., USA) and a related confusion ma-trix were performed. The reliability of the discriminative model was assessed by a set of statistic metrics including the Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) as reported in Bisutti et al. (2019). Based on the outcomes of the confusion matrix, the discriminant capacity of NIR spec-tral data was satisfactory for Pressato (MCC = 0.94) meanwhile it was less accurate for fresh Allevo (MCC = 0.81) and Allevo (MCC = 0.84). Moreover, 3.3% of Pressato and 6.6% of Alle-vo samples were misclassified as fresh Allevo suggesting that the complex set of biochemical markers and the hard texture of Asiago (Allevo) is achieved beyond 4-months of ripening. Summarizing, NIR spectroscopy can be a useful tool to discriminate PDO Asiago cheese varie-ty even if the authentication of the more ripened varieties could be improved if they differ over two months as period of maturation.
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