During visits to 20 federally inspected establishments producing meat ravioli, 577 production line samples and 480 finished product units were collected for bacteriological analyses. Four types of finished, packaged ravioli were encountered: (a) whole ravioli boiled at least 5 min; (b) raw pasta stuffed with a cooked filling; (c) only the meat component cooked; and (d) uncooked ravioli. The microbiological quality of frozen ravioli was affected more by the filling than the pasta. Slow freezing resulted in increased bacterial levels in the finished product. For the boiled ravioli, 100% of the finished product sets contained less than 50 coliforms per g, four of five sets had less than one Escherichia coli per g, and 100% had fewer than one Staphylococcus aureus per g. Four of five sets of packaged boiled ravioli had aerobic plate counts (APC) of less than 10,000 per g. For the raw pasta with a cooked filling-type ravioli, the geometric means of 9 sets were: coliforms, 47 per g; E. coli, 6.7 per g; S. aureus, 10 per g; and APC, 170,000 per g. For the ravioli with only the meat component cooked, the geometric means of 27 sets were: coliforms, 190 per g; E. coli, 1.8 per g; S. aureus, 3.9 per g; and APC, 300,000 per g. For uncooked ravioli, the geometric means of 7 sets were: coliforms, 490 per g; E. coli, 19 per g; S. aureus, 5.7 per g; and APC, 690,000 per g. Only one finished ravioli unit in 480 contained Salmonella.
A note on the natural density of product sets
