Does Dietary Lipid Level Affect the Quality of Triploid Rainbow Trout and How Should It Be Assessed?

Organoleptic properties and nutritional value are the most important characteristics of fish fillet quality, which can be determined by a series of quality evaluation indexes and closely related to fish nutrition. Systematic organoleptic and nutritional quality evaluation indexes consisting of 139 indexes for physical properties and chemical compositions of triploid rainbow trout were established. Besides, effects of dietary lipid levels (6.6%, 14.8%, 22.8% and 29.4%) on the quality of triploid rainbow trout were analyzed in the study. The main results showed that, for fillet appearance quality, fish fed diets with lipid levels above 22.8% had higher fillet thickness and redness but lower gutted yield and fillet yield (p < 0.05). For fillet texture, fish fed the diet with a 6.6% lipid level had the highest fillet hardness (5.59 N) and lowest adhesiveness (1.98 mJ) (p < 0.05), which could be related to lipid, glycogen, water soluble protein and collagen contents of the fish fillet. For fillet odor, the odor intensity of “green, fatty and fishy” significantly increased with the increase of the dietary lipid level (from 1400 to 2773 ng/g muscle; p < 0.05), which was related to the degradation of n-6 and n-9 fatty acids. For fillet taste, a high lipid diet (≥22.8%) could increase the umami taste compounds contents (from 114 to 261 mg/100 g muscle) but decrease the bitterness and sourness taste compounds contents (from 127 to 106 mg/100 g muscle and from 1468 to 1075 mg/100 g muscle, respectively) (p < 0.05). For nutritional value, a high lipid diet could increase the lipid nutrition level (such as the content of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids increased from 3.47 to 4.41 g/kg muscle) but decease tryptophan and selenium content (from 2.48 to 1.60 g/kg muscle and from 0.17 to 0.11 g/kg muscle, respectively). In total, a high lipid diet could improve the quality of triploid rainbow trout. The minimum dietary lipid level for triploid rainbow trout should be 22.8% to keep the better organoleptic and nutritional quality.