Frozen prepared food, any of the complete meals or portions of meals that are precooked, assembled into a package, and frozen for retail sale. They are popular among consumers because they provide a diverse menu and are convenient to prepare. A typical frozen prepared meal contains a meat entree, a vegetable, a starch-based food such as pasta, and sauce. The manufacture of such a product requires careful attention by the food processor.
Preparation of meal components
Meats are often one of the major components in a frozen meal. Several processing methods are used in preparing meats, such as marinating, cooking, and cutting or slicing.
In order to tenderize the meat and develop desirable sensory attributes, a marinade is often helpful. Typical marinades contain salt, vinegar, lemon juice, spices, citric acid, and oil. Tenderization of meats is particularly enhanced by marinades that contain proteolytic enzymes—that is, enzymes that help to break down proteins. Meats are simply soaked in the marinade, or they are injected with marinade using special injection machines.
Cooking of meats is necessary to eliminate all pathogens such as bacteria that produce harmful toxins. In a typical cooking process, the temperature at the centre of the meat is raised to 70° C (160° F) and held for at least two minutes.
Many meats are fried in immersion fryers. During frying, meats are cooked and desirable flavours created. Furthermore, the hot oil used in frying sears the surface of the meat, minimizing moisture loss during cooking. When meats are coated with breading material, frying is helpful in binding the batter. The oil retained in the breading layer enhances the aroma and texture of the fried foods.
Certain delicate foods, such as fish, are breaded and pre-fried for a short time to bind the breading material. Actual cooking of the fish is done when the consumer reheats the product. On the other hand, fried chicken is completely precooked during the frying process. Frozen fried chicken is reheated mainly to raise the serving temperature.
Commercial fryers are either batch or continuous units. In a continuous fryer, the foodstuff is placed on a feed conveyor that moves the product into a tank filled with frying oil. The oil is heated to 170°–180° C (340°–360° F). Simultaneously, another conveyor moves in the same direction just above the feed conveyor in order to prevent the food material from floating in the tank. The speed of the feed conveyor is carefully controlled so that the product remains immersed in oil for the required time. At the end of the tank, the conveyor moves the fried foodstuff above the oil, the surface oil being drained back into the tank.
Oven cooking is another method used to prepare main entrees in frozen prepared meals. Inside an oven, foods are heated by conduction, convection, or radiation. Certain ovens are designed to introduce steam during the heating cycle. In continuous-type ovens, the food moves on a mesh conveyor through different zones where the food may be subjected to different air velocities and steam flow in order to maintain the humidity at a desired level.
Batch-type ovens are ideally suited to cooking under vacuum. In vacuum cooking, meats are cooked at reduced pressure and temperature. In one vacuum technique, known as sous-vide cooking, foods are cooked in their own juices, thus retaining their natural flavours and moisture. Cooking time is usually increased because of the low temperatures employed. The process involves placing the food inside a laminated pouch and subjecting the packaged product to vacuum before sealing. The sealed pouch is then cooked in boiling water. After cooking, the pouches are quickly cooled in a stream of cold water prior to freezing.
Slicing and dicing
Cooked meats are more sensitive to physical handling than raw meats, because upon cooking the meat tissues become loosely connected with one another. Therefore, cooked meats are cooled to low temperatures, resulting in the stiffening of the muscle fibres, thus easing the cutting and slicing operations.
When the meats are in frozen state—that is, at temperatures between -18° and -23° C (0° and -10° F)—they are tempered before cutting. Tempering involves warming the frozen meats to temperatures slightly below their freezing point—for example, between -4° and -1° C (25° and 30° F). Tempering of frozen foods is often carried out in industrial-scale microwave ovens.
Meats are cut into cubes or dices by a dicing machine. A common industrial-scale dicer uses a knife blade attached to a revolving impeller. With each revolution of the impeller, the blade removes a slice from the large pieces of meat that are fed to the machine. The meat slices are cut into squares using cross-cut knives. The diced product is then discharged from the machine.
The vegetable portion of a prepared meal may be procured directly from a frozen-food processor, or raw vegetables may be frozen on site. Processed vegetables that are intended for inclusion in prepared foods may be frozen if they are to be stored for a long duration, or they may be directly conveyed to the processing area for assembly on meal trays.
In preparing pasta, size is an important criterion. Thin pastas such as spaghetti cook rapidly, so their texture is more difficult to control. Thick pastas, on the other hand, can be heated and cooled in a more controlled manner.
Pastas are cooked in rotary blanchers holding large volumes of water. A gentle rotary action in the blancher helps to avoid clumping during cooking. (Vegetable oil may also be added to the cooking water.) At the end of the cooking cycle, surface starch is washed off the pasta, again to avoid clumping. Immersing the cooked pasta in cold water also stops the cooking process.
Sauces and gravies impart desirable sensory attributes to meats and vegetables. Furthermore, they help to prevent undesirable changes that result from dehydration of frozen foods during long-term storage. The most common sauces are either tomato- or cream-based. All sauces are accented with spices, thickening agents, emulsifiers, and salt.
Dry ingredients are weighed and mixed in mixing blenders. The type of blender used depends on the physical characteristics of the ingredient particles and on whether any liquids or shortening agents are to be added to the mix. Complete mixing of the ingredients with the liquids or shortenings is vital to prevent inconsistencies in the final product.
Tomato sauce is often made from tomato paste. Tomato paste usually contains from 24 to 36 percent tomato solids. Typically, it is procured in drums or flexible multiwall bags. Water is pumped in to flush out the paste and to help in diluting it to the desired concentration for sauce. The resulting tomato puree is then mixed with other ingredients to prepare the sauce.
Cream-based sauces begin with stock solutions, which are prepared by boiling raw stock material such as beef, fish, or poultry in water. Boiling is conducted in large kettles that may be operated either open to the atmosphere or under vacuum. Boiling under vacuum, accomplished at temperatures lower than 100° C (212° F), helps to retain more flavour compounds in the stock. Salt, spices, and herbs are added during the cooking process. After cooking is completed, the muscle tissue is removed.
Mixing, cooking, and cooling
In preparing sauces, dry mixes and liquids are blended to obtain a well-mixed slurry. The slurry is then fed into a cooking vessel, typically an open steam-jacketed kettle. Kettles may also be fitted with agitators, blenders, or scrapers. The agitator, located on the central axis, moves the product away from the heat-transfer surface of the kettle, an action that provides thorough cooking or cooling of the food material. Sometimes the scraper fingers of the agitator may move the product into the path of a secondary agitator for enhanced blending. Scraping and agitating help to minimize the building up of burned material on the heated surface.
During cooking of sauces, continued heating results in the swelling and gelation of the thickening agents and in the extraction of flavours from the seasoning agents. In order to retain more of the volatile and natural colour pigments, cooking may be done under vacuum.
Cream sauces are usually homogenized after heating. Homogenization ensures that fat globules will retain the small size necessary to stabilize the resulting emulsion. The scraping action must be done at high speed to prevent scorching the product.
After cooking, sauces are cooled rapidly to approximately 4° C (40° F). If the sauces contain only small or no particulates, then plate heat exchangers are used for cooling. In a plate heat exchanger, there is an indirect contact between the sauce and a cooling medium such as chilled water. A countercurrent flow arrangement between the sauce and the cooling medium assures high energy efficiency. After cooling, the sauce is stored in chilled holding tanks.
If the sauce formulation involves additional particulates—e.g., diced mushrooms, raisins, or cooked meat—it is often desirable to precook the particulates and then blend them into sauce that has been already cooked and cooled. Although the particulates can be added prior to the cooking process, cooking them in sauce is usually avoided because of the adverse effects of heating on their texture.AD!!!!
Assembly and freezing
Meal components are commonly assembled on trays made of aluminum foil, paperboard, plastic, or ceramic (see Figure 1). Special areas are stamped into the trays to create spaces for individual meal components. This type of package can be conveniently used directly by the consumer for reheating and then serving the food. In the case of boil-in-bag meals, the bag is made of laminated film. After a foodstuff is placed inside the bag, the air inside is evacuated, and the bag with its contents is frozen. The consumer simply places the bag with its contents in boiling water to prepare the meal.
In order to assemble the prepared meal, adequate amounts of each meal component must be available. Often, meat portions, vegetables, and pasta are taken to the processing areas in large trays. Sauces are conveyed to the depositing areas by pumps. Depositing machines are then used automatically to weigh and place the required amounts of a given component directly onto the tray or into the bag.
Frozen vegetables are typically fed into a depositor through a feed chamber. The rotating bottom of the feed chamber usually contains several cavities that accept a designated amount of a food material. Under the depositing machines, the movement of the trays on the conveyor belts is sequenced. The cavities open directly over the meal tray above a designated slot. After the meat or vegetable is deposited on the tray, the sauce may be dispensed to coat the desired meal component.
Trays with meal components are inspected to assure that each item has been properly placed in the tray. Machines are used to detect any undesirable items such as metal or glass fragments. The trays are then conveyed directly to a freezer.
Freezing of prepared and packaged meals is done rapidly to minimize changes in quality. Typically, once inside a freezer, foods are frozen to at least -40° C (-40° F) within 90 minutes.
In one common type of freezer, the belt freezer, food trays or boil-in-bags are placed on a simple wire-mesh belt. The belt conveys the product into an air-blast room operated at -40° C. While a single belt arrangement is simple, a multitiered belt may be used to save floor space. In this case, a feed conveyor moves the product through several tiers of belts located inside the air-blast room.
A more compact arrangement employs a spiral belt. The spiral arrangement maximizes the belt surface area for a given floor space. A popular type of spiral freezer uses self-stacking belts. In the self-stacking arrangement, each tier rests on the vertical side flanges of the tier beneath. Several configurations of air flow are possible. Counter-current vertical air flow, for instance, permits greater energy efficiencies. The air is channeled between the belts to minimize the time required for freezing. Faster rates of freezing minimize the dehydration of foods.
Plate freezers are commonly used for freezing brick-shaped packaged products. In plate freezers, refrigerant is allowed to circulate inside thin channels within the plates. The packaged products are firmly pressed between the plates. High rates of heat transfer can be obtained between the packaged product and the refrigerant plates.
After the freezing process, the frozen prepared foods are packaged in cartons. The cartons are labeled and stored in a frozen warehouse until needed for shipment to retail outlets.