Abstract
Skin from white fish is highly desirable raw material as collagen and gelatine marked, especially based on marine raw materials, is exploding during recent years. This leads for the situation where collagen/gelatine producing industry facing the situation with the lack of collagen rich raw materials as fish skins and bones. White fish industry is one of the suppliers of the fish skin, however significant part of skin generated on board is wasted and dumped in the seas. One of the reasons is the lack of simple and suitable preservation technology, which would allow to bring to shore processing industry high quality raw materials for collagen/gelatine extraction. This work indicated that several technologies such as freezing, salting and preservation by low pH can be used for preservation of whitefish skin intended for gelatine extraction. All three tested preservation methods gave high yield of gelatine (8-13g gelatine/100g raw material) containing desirable amino acids composition with imino acids concentration up till 19% of all amino acids. This work indicates that simple and cheap preservation technologies can be used for storage and transportation of whitefish skins, which then can be used for production of high-quality marine gelatine.
