42 FOOD & DRINK TECHNOLOGY
Beating the bacterial ‘danger zone’
The latest chilling equipment speeds processing of cooked pasta, vegetables, rice and dry beans. Jim McMahon reports.
Le tout nouveau système de refroidissement accélère le traitement des pâtes cuites, des légumes, du riz et des haricots secs. Compte-rendu de Jim McMahon.
Die neuesten Kühlgeräte beschleunigen die Verarbeitung gekochter Nudeln, Gemüse, Reis und Trockenbohnen. Jim McMahon berichtet.
T
he cooling of cooked and blanched foods has been an area of particular interest
for most food processors that incorporate pasta, rice, vegetables and dry beans into their food products.
Uniformity in cooling is critical to achieve a refrigerated, frozen or canned meal that will have the desirable texture and taste when it is later reheated for consumption. Te blanched pasta cannot be too stiff or too soft. Te fettuccine, linguine, tagliatelle and spaghetti cannot be stuck together or damaged. Te cooked rice should keep its texture, have the right amount of free starch or stickiness and maintain its kernel integrity. Dry beans should not be bursting or split. And vegetables should have the desired firmness and consistency. Regardless of the cooking or blanching method used,
without a highly effective cooling capability these products cannot be obtained with a high degree of uniformity.
Even more important, the rapid chilling of product which has been cooked is an area of food production that is particularly beset with challenging temperature parameters, which if violated, can open the door to product contamination.
Bacteria like to grow in the ‘danger zone’, an environment that is between 40° and 140°F. During a commercial cooking process, raw ingredients are brought up past 140°F as quickly as possible to the final cooking temperature, thus minimising the time that food products are kept in the Danger Zone. Te same is true on the other end of the product line – reducing the temperature as quickly as
possible through the danger zone to below 40°F is essential.
To achieve a high level of product quality, and maintain the assurance of product safety in a time frame compliant with USDA and FDA standards, requires several conditions of a cooling process, including precisely controlling the temperature and time of the cooling cycle, ensuring the product is being equally cooled, and that proper agitation exists to keep the product separated but undamaged. Few conventional cooling systems, however, have successfully integrated all of these components to effectively deliver 100 per cent uniformity in product cooling.
Conventional cooling systems For many years, water-spray and airflow shaker conveyors and rotary
Fig. 1. Lyco Easy-Flow chills most food products from 200˚F to 40-50˚F in 21 seconds.
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