Fishburger from aquacultured European species: nutritional quality and future prospective.

European sea bass, gilthead sea bream, and rainbow trout are common species in the Mediterranean area, generally marketed as whole or fillets whilst few derived products are currently commercialized. After all, the recent economical crisis, the saturation of market, and the strong foreign competition are pushing seafood industry toward new marketing approaches such as product diversification. Recently, technologies such as mechanical separation process (MSM) have been demonstrated to be successfully applied to fish by-products for increasing processing yield. Nevertheless, scarce are the information on nutritional quality of MSM from species of interest for European aquaculture. The present study aimed to evaluate nutritional characteristics of fishburger obtained from mechanical separation process applied on damaged or out-size European sea bass, gilthead sea bream, and rainbow trout. Fatty acid profile, and mineral composition were determined. Besides, nutritional indexes (Atherogenicity Index, AI, Thrombogencity Index, TI, and Hypocholesterolemic/Hypercolesterolemc Index, HH) were calculated. Despite the high percentage of fat contained in 100 g of fish muscle (more than 8% in all the considered species), the characteristics of intramuscular fat are very interesting for human nutrition as a consequence of the predominance of PUFAω3, especially in seawater species. Present findings revealed that a portion (100 g) of MSM burger of sea bass and sea bream may provide 2150 and 1978 mg of EPA+DHA respectively (suggested intake: 250 mg per day) together with a ω3/ω6 ratio as 2.96 and 3.64. Trout instead would provide for around 700 mg EPA+DHA, but with a poor ω3/ω6 ratio (0.74). Very low AI and TI values were calculated for all the analyzed species. Burgers represented a good sources of K and P, whereas the microelement selenium was found only in trace. Specifically, around 360 and 220 mg/100 g of K and P were quantified in seawater species, whereas trout contained approximately 440 and 217 mg/100g of K and P. In conclusion, mechanical separated meat from aquacultured species resulted in a high nutritional quality raw material for new products, such as fishburger. However, further investigations on consumers acceptance and preference are suggested together to the impact of different cooking methods on product characteristics.