Valorization of Araucaria angustifolia pinhão coat as a source of phenolics characterized by HRMS and application in chicken mortadella.

The Brazilian pinhão nut, the seed of Araucaria angustifolia, generates a largely discarded outer coat that remains underexplored despite its potential as a source of bioactive compounds. This study investigated the pinhão coat by evaluating extraction strategies to obtain phenolic-rich extracts and assessing functionality in chicken mortadella. Ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) was investigated as a green extraction strategy using a 32 full factorial design whose responses were analyzed by polynomial regression to construct response surfaces, varying ethanol concentration and extraction time, with total phenolic content (TPC) and antioxidant activity (ABTS, DPPH, and FRAP) as response variables. Within the experimental domain investigated, the best-performing evaluated UAE condition was 85% ethanol and 15 min, which produced the highest TPC and antioxidant capacity. However, the extraction yield was insufficient for technological application, prompting the use of exhaustive extraction (EE) to maximize compound recovery under the best-performing ethanol:water ratio identified for UAE. Although UAE is considered a greener technique, the Analytical Greenness metric for sample preparation (AGREEprep) assessment revealed a higher greenness score for EE (0.62) than UAE (0.56), mainly due to differences in sample-size economy and energy consumption under the AGREEprep weighting scheme. Phenolic compounds were characterized by HPLC-DAD and tentatively identified by high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS), providing one of the most detailed chemical profiles reported for pinhão coat, a scarcely studied matrix. The extracts were dominated by flavonoids, particularly glycosylated derivatives of kaempferol and quercetin, together with flavanols such as catechin, epicatechin, epigallocatechin, and catechin gallate. The extract was incorporated into chicken mortadella which was stored at 4 ± 1 °C for 56 days. The 0.5% formulation delayed lipid oxidation up to day 28, whereas the 0.75% formulation better preserved pH and total volatile basic nitrogen (TVB-N) stability and showed lower color variation than the 0.5% formulation.