Figure 1

(a) Experimental overview, including sample size during storage days. “Control” represents fish wrapped in plastic surrounded by ice, where 10 fish were used to measure WHC on the left fillets from whole fish at t = 0 after slaughter. Thereafter, these fish were kept in a cold room and sampling of WHC was done on the right fillets on days 2 and 4 postmortem. “Ice” represents whole fish stored on ice, “RSW” represents fish stored in refrigerated seawater. “Left” and “right” represents left and right fillets respectively. On day 7 after filleting, left fillets were kept as raw while right fillets were dry salted and cold-smoked. The ice and RSW fillets were sampled periodically for 3 weeks, while control fillets were sampled on the last sampling week. (b) Schematic illustration showing weekly sampling locations (n = 6 for raw fillets, n = 10 for smoked fillets). Control fillets were sampled on the last sampling day (n = 7 for raw fillets, n = 7 for smoked fillets). (1) microbiology analysis, (2) frozen samples for enzyme and salt analysis, (3) Water holding capacity and water content, (4) Norwegian Quality Cut (NQC) for texture analysis.