Comparison of chemiluminescent and AOAC methods for determining nitrite in commercial cured meat products

A chemiluminescent detector was used to measure nitrite in a variety of commercial cured meat products, using the AOAC sample preparation procedure, 24.041. A comparison of the NaNO2 values obtained by using sulfanilamide/N-(1-naphthyl)ethylenediamine (SAN/NED) reagent, sulfanilamide/1-naphthylamine reagent, and chemiluminescent detection (CLD) revealed no significant differences between the latter 2 detection methods. The AOAC SAN/NED reagent combination gave an average of 24.6% lower NaNO2 results than CLD. Examination of the sample preparation extraction and heating steps indicated that the procedure could not be made more rapid because of the need to destroy residual reductants and release "bound-complexed-reacted" nitrite from the meat samples.