Abstract: The nitrates and nitrites are two common food additives in meat processing. They have some useful functions as improving color and flavor, deferring oxidation and acidification of fat and disinfecting Clostridium botulinum, to prolong the shelf life of meat products. But people had found in early 70’s last century, the carcinogenic material--nitrosamine by reacting with amino acid. Furthermore, the nitrate could produce nitrosamine when it comes into stomach. This article fully concentrated on the minimum nitrosamine formation with residual sodium nitrite content changes in the salted ham processing with respect to salting time, cooking time, cooking temperature and adding quantity of additives such as sodium nitrite sodium sodium ascorbate. The optimum results are: 24h salting time, 0.12g/kg sodium nitrite, 0.64g/kg sodium ascorbate, 1h cooking time and 85℃ cooking temperature (for 250g meat size per piece) to keep the product in good color with low level of nitrosamine compound produced.

Key words: salted ham, the factors of process, nitroso-compound