The company said the unit is the latest addition to its Revoband Continuous Cookers range and is suitable for a wide range of meat products including chicken, sausages and hamburgers, sliced bacon, convenience foods, ready meals and meatballs as well as vegetables such as potatoes.
According to the firm, the browning unit should appeal to food manufacturers aiming to produce 100 per cent natural products.
A spokesperson for the Edinburgh-based company said the unit has a high impingement system that directs a stream of hot air directly at the product being cooked, from both above and below the travelling belt, thus providing excellent consistency and colour in about ten to fifteen minutes depending on the product.
Market research
She told FoodProductionDaily.com that the development of the browning unit was informed by its food manufacturing customers’ demands for an alternative method to the conventional approach of adding sugar and honey coatings to make food products look roasted.
“This would traditionally have been done in a batch oven, but Double D has developed a way of giving even, overall browning on all surfaces of, for instance, cooked ham logs or large oval hams,” said the spokesperson.
“When required, steam is injected for rapid rise of product internal temperatures and protection of valuable yields,” she added.
She said the browning unit is modular so that it can be adapted to enable greater capacity when required by the individual processor.
Hygiene
The spokesperson said that the cooker can include a Clean-in-Place (CIP) system where an extensive system of sparge pipes delivers a pressurised heated caustic solution throughout the cooker, while access doors also make manual cleaning easy.
She added that the browning unit has undergone extensive testing to ensure quality and safety at the company’s site.
“Double D has a fully equipped test centre at its factory in Edinburgh where all products are thoroughly trialled and tested using a variety of different products,” claims the spokesperson.
The Scottish manufacturer said the new browning unit is available worldwide.
The company has a global customer base, having recently signed a distribution agreement with a North American supplier of meat processing machinery, Nu-Meat Technology.
The company said at the time that teaming up with the New Jersey-based supplier should increase its leverage in the US, where it currently has a number of installations with processors of meat and poultry.