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07/11/2012

Requirement of In-Flight Pasta Dishes

 

The difficulty lies in the pasta cooking and cooling process of IQF freezer. There are many different types of pasta, each requiring varied cooking times. For pasta entrées, such as in-flight meals that will be frozen, the pasta is only partially cooked (blanched), and needs to be cooled very rapidly to stop the cooking process. Otherwise, when the pasta is reheated onboard it will be too stiff or too soft, instead of al dente which is the desired texture of cooked pasta in traditional Italian cooking.

 

Kettle systems or Italian conveyor systems have been used for quite some time to cook and blanch pasta, but they have their drawbacks. Neither is capable of precisely controlling the temperature and time of the pasta cooking and cooling process. And equally important is their difficulty in keeping the long pastas from sticking together during the blanching and cooling process. Neither system provides an agitation capability to keep the pasta strands separated.

 

The sticking develops clumps of pasta which need to be removed and increases waste. Hence, the long pastas, even though consumer interest in them has been steadily growing, have proven to be more costly to produce and run a higher risk of being a lesser quality Italian dish when served.

 

Continuous-Flow Pasta Cooking and Cooling in IQF Freezers

The continuous-flow pasta cooking/cooling system which Perfect Pasta uses was developed by Lyco Manufacturing. The cooker-coolers utilize two completely enclosed duo rotary drum cylinders, one for cooking and one for cooling directly following in sequence. The drums have internal augers—a perforated skin sheet is wrapped around the drums and fixed to the auger’s flights. These flights gently move the pasta through the cooker and cooler system. The pasta is carefully agitated, while submersed in water, as it advances through the cylinders. Damage to fragile pasta products is a fraction of one percent.

 

Once through the cooker machine, having reached the programmed temperature/time—in a first-in/first-out sequence—the pasta is then gently deposited into the following cooling drum, and chilled to its programmed temperature and time factor. The pasta is then released onto a belt conveyor for downstream combining with sauce, vegetables and other ingredients. The entrées are sealed and then move into a spiral freezer where they are individually quick frozen (IQF) at -45 degrees F, boxed and put into cold storage at -10 degrees F to be subsequently shipped to the airlines.

 

Consistent process parameters for temperature, time and recipes automatically control the pasta cooking and cooling hour after hour, and out-perform the batch method and the Italian cooker formally.

 

Having a truly continuous process for cooking and cooling pasta, and the flexibility of running multiple products throughout the production day at different temperatures and at different retention times, is a unique feature that Lyco equipment provides.