Soups, Sauces & Ready Meals
From large particulate soups such as minestrone, through to a smooth béchamel sauce, we can provide the most efficient food processing system for the recipe.
Our advanced cooking, mixing and cooling technology is deployed heavily in the UK and as far away as Australia. Our experienced team can recommend the right system for your recipes as well as assisting with product development and trials. High-quality cooking systems can be teamed together with our range of cooling systems along with accessories for blending and mixing. We can create the perfect bespoke system for each individual customers’ needs.
The BCH Process
Cooking
The BCH range of cooking processes allow the user to cook products in atmospheric, vacuum or pressure conditions, all of which can be combined into one system to gain maximum flexibility if required.
Atmospheric Cooking – often benefits from steam injection cooking when there is a requirement for rapid heating and/or a need to avoid the risk of damage from a steam jacket. The application of steam directly gives the best heat transfer coefficient where all the energy is consumed by the product.
Vacuum Cooking – allows the product to be cooked at lower temperatures and is often used for the preparation of stocks, jams and preserves, chutneys and caramels or any process that requires a reduction cook (evaporation). This is useful where products are concentrated to specific solids percentages or weights, such as when stocks are being manufactured.
Pressure Cooking – is particularly designed for products such as pie fillings, ragus, stews, curries and ‘long-cook’ vegetable processes. Typically, a 4 hour cook can be completed in 75 minutes creating huge savings in time, cost, labour and energy.
The Pressure Cooking method also improves processing times with vegetarian options such as pulses, beans and chickpeas.
BCH systems offer a unique horizontal style agitation which gives exceptional particulate distribution and mixing, both during the cooking and transfer process, keeping the particulates in suspension before and during transfer to the next process.
Cooling
BCH can offer several types of cooling such as vacuum, scraped surface units and pouch cooling tumble chillers. This will depend on the finished product requirements whether you want to hot fill, chill or freeze after completion of the cooking process.
Vacuum Cooling – BCH Vacuum Cooling System ensures a complete high-performance system, providing the fastest and most effective means of heat removal from a batch process. BCH’s vacuum cooling solutions can typically cool products from 90°C down to 5°C within 45 minutes without the need for expensive refrigeration used on scrape surface, pouch cooling and the traditional blast chilling rooms.
A vacuum cooling system operates at around 30% of the cost of comparable refrigeration systems. The vacuum system can be supplied with a seal water recovery system, thus reducing operating costs further.
Scrape Surface Units – Ideal for low viscosity, smooth sauces manufactured in bulk.
RotaChill Pouch Cooling – Ideal for high or low viscosity sauces with or without particulates. This system has the benefit of providing increased shelf life for chilled products.
