## 2 Materials and Methods  
### Ham Origin and Processing  
The raw hams for this study originated from an observational study conducted in the frame of the H2020 project, TREASURE (Grant Agreement N\({}^{\circ}\) 634476). Twenty TP pigs were kept in an outdoor production system, with a wooden shelter and fenced forest/pasture area (ca. 6000 m\({}^{2}\)), at the experimental facility of the Faculty of Agriculture,University of Zagreb, located in the Turopolje forest. The trial did not involve any procedures with animals that would require approval according to Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experimentation, and the study protocol was approved by the Ethical Committee of the TREASURE project. During the first part of the trial (which started at an average age of 400 days and a live weight of 45 kg), all pigs were housed together and fed 2 kg of commercial feed mixture (ST-II, Fanon d.o.o., Petrijanec, Croatia) per animal, distributed as a single daily ration in the morning. At an average age of 506 days, the pigs were allocated either to the experimental group (\(n=10\)), which received a feed mixture supplemented with acorns from the European oak (_Quercus robur_), or to the control group (\(n=10\)), which continued to receive only the aforementioned feed mixture. Pigs were kept in two separate enclosures of the same size. During the final fattening phase, which lasted for 46 days, the control pigs received 3 kg of feed mixture per head daily. The acorn-supplemented pigs received 2 kg of feed mixture and were additionally given 2 kg of acorns per head daily. The higher daily amount of feed in the acorn-fed group was intended to compensate for the lower metabolisable energy derived from the acorns compared to the feed mixture. The animals had free access to water. The chemical composition and the composition of the main fatty acid groups of the feed mixture and acorns used in the experiment are shown in Table 1.  
At an average age of 552 days and an average live weight of 95 kg, all pigs were transported to a commercial slaughterhouse (ca. 7 km from the experimental site) and slaughtered on the same day, according to the standard abattoi procedure. After 24 h of chilling, the carcass halves from both groups were delivered to a commercial meat processing plant (IGOMAT d.o.o., Otrusevec, Croatia) and were separately cut into primary parts, from which the raw hams (10 per feeding treatment) were selected for further processing. The trimmed thighs were weighed and rubbed by hand with a mixture of curing salt (NaCl with 0.6% NaNO\({}_{2}\)) and spices (black pepper, garlic, and paprika), piled into large PVC tubs and left to be salted in the cold (T = 4 \({}^{\circ}\)C, RH = 85) for 5 weeks. After salting, the hams were cold-smoked in a smokehouse (T = 20 \({}^{\circ}\)C, RH = 80%) with beech wood smoke a total of 8 times for 60 min and were then transferred to a chamber for drying and ripening under controlled conditions (T = 14 \({}^{\circ}\)C, RH = 72%). For the lightly smoked hams, the difference in procedure from the standard processing described above was a 50% reduction in the application of smoke (4 instead of 8 applications). The distribution of hams, grouped according to processing method and the animal's diet, was a 2 \(\times\) 2 factorial design, with half of the lightly smoked hams coming from control-fed pigs and the other half coming from acorn-fed pigs, and the same distribution was applied for the standard smoking process (5 hams for each of 4 groups or 10 hams per effect of processing and diet). At the end of processing, when the hams were 15 months old, they were reweighed to