Meat
Bacon
Bacon offers more than just a savory taste. It has evolved into a versatile product that has been consumers’ favorite for centuries, whether smoked or unsmoked. Bacon’s appeal lies in its balance of flavor, affordability and availability. Perfecting bacon requires expertise throughout the entire process -from marination and curing to slicing and packaging- ensuring quality, taste, and consistency.
How to overcome challenges that demands for healthier alternatives and more natural ingredients raise?
Curing has been used to preserve meat for over five thousand years, and until the invention of refrigeration, curing using salts and spices was one of the most important methods of preserving meat to extend food supply. People grew to appreciate the delectable flavors and aromas associated with these techniques. Today, bacon producers are challenged to make their processes healthier with less salt, less functional ingredients, without nitrate and under green label certificate, while meeting food safety, yield, hygiene and high-quality requirements. With knowledge and understanding of the whole process and how to control and manage each step, GEA can help you get it right first time, every time.
Examples of bacon applications
Evolving from hand-cut chunks of chicken breast to formed poultry filet mix, either fry-cooked to cook-fried, during production manufacturers continuously look for consistent product quality, maximum yield, food safety and attractive appearance. But how to achieve this? If you really wants to go for the so-called ‘golden standard’ nugget, you need to excel in every stage of the production process, starting from the ingredients and their preparation, moving to forming and tempura mixing, up to cooking, frying, freezing and packaging. With all the know-how about the tempura application, built up over the past 50 years, GEA is the partner to go for gold.
The secret is all in the mix
The way in which the product is mixed is critical to the success of the forming process. Through many years of developing mixing technology GEA has perfected the process. By measuring the torque within the GEA ProMix as the product is chilled, GEA engineers can help customers to hit the optimum level of chilling every time, taking the guess work away and allowing the GEA MaxiFormer to run continuously for many hours without clogging. If customers experience difficulties in getting the mix right, GEA Food Technologists will work with them, until it’s perfect.
'It's all in the mix' also applies on the tempura batter mix as consistent tempura viscosity is essential for optimizing pick-up, therefore avoiding give-away and ensuring crunchiness of the product. With GEA TempuMixer II manufacturers can achieve that.
The secret is going for gold
GEA frying equipment helps you achieve crisp, crunchy and golden-colored nuggets. The formed and coated nuggets are flash fried in GEA EasyFry to stabilize the coating and give color. Designed to meet the highest safety standard, the fryer features low oil consumption, self-supportive oil filtration and recipe control and with our oil management solutions you can extend your oil lifespan up to 5 times!
During cooking the goal is to fully cook the product to guarantee food safety and to achieve the desired yield and juiciness of the end-product. The flash-fried nuggets go through GEA CookStar three-phase spiral oven, where steam and heat is added. Steam has a lot of latent heat and is therefore very effective to transfer energy into the nugget. Due to the higher humidity less moist is lost, therefore achieving higher yields.
The secret is GEA’s advanced technology
Mixing, forming, coating, frying, cooking, freezing and packaging, GEA can supply the complete automated tempura coated nugget line
The secret is complete line control
GEA installed the first fully automated chicken nugget line at Danpo A/S in Denmark, leader in fully cooked chicken products. On this line they produce a range of chicken nuggets under its ‘Your Chicken’ brand. The line includes the GEA MaxiFormer at its heart, providing high-quality nuggets in a fully automatic, high production process, using the minimum of labor. Watch the video to see how they grind, mix, coat, cook, fry, freeze and pack chicken nuggets day in, day out with only 2 operators.
Productos y tecnologías
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Defrosting & Tumbling
Whether you defrost, melt or thaw using a refrigerator, heating your product or add cold water. It is very hard to control the way your product is reacting and you usually need long time frames to do it.
Equipos de cocción, horneado, asado y ahumado
Saber cocinar un producto y comprender los principios de la cocina es la base del arte culinario. Los hornos GEA le ayudan a servir a la cadena alimentaria con productos atractivos, sanos e innovadores.
Inyectores
La inyección con salmuera puede aumentar los beneficios de la elaboración de carnes rojas, cerdo, aves, pescado y brinda la oportunidad de desarrollar una serie de productos atractivos para los clientes.
Plantas de salmuera
El primer paso para adobar/marinar alimentos de forma correcta, es realizar una mezcla homogénea y almacenar la salmuera o adobo en condiciones controladas.
Otras aplicaciones
Discover a typical bacon process
By industrial defrosting in a sealed environment, using steam under a near vacuum, frozen bellies can be defrosted quickly and safely, without compromising product quality and overall yield. This method eliminates the risk of contamination and results in better retention of meat juices, maintaining yield during further processing. GEA's ColdSteam T offers substantial cost-efficiency and financial benefits, often recovering its initial investment within a year.
For premium-quality sliced and packed bacon, precise marination and curing are crucial. GEA's 2mm OptiFlex needles ensure an exact brine injection, delivering exceptional brine distribution and reducing blockages. This process results in an evenly cured product with minimal needle marks, further enhanced by the MultiShaker, which gently massages the product to close needle holes and prevent brine loss.
GEA offers an inline solution for smoking meats, using its CookStar spiral ovens, eliminating the need for traditional smokehouses. This efficient, compact process allows for both natural and atomized smoking, where wood condensates like beech provide healthier, customizable flavors for “clean label” products. Inline smoking ensures uniform color and flavor with reduced labor, energy, and space. Customers report enhanced product consistency, higher capacity, and lower maintenance. GEA's solution supports flexibility for smoked and non-smoked items in a single oven and promises future real-time data tracking for precise production control.
Preserve the product by freezing the bacon.
Slicing bacon products in the most efficient way maximizes product utilization, optimizes output, improves yield, and reduces give-away. Our slicing machines are reliable, flexible, and easy to operate and maintain. Loading of shingle, stack, zig-zag, shaved, interleaved, or any contour portions is also done in the most efficient way. Our efficient loading systems feed the portions fully automatically from the slicer to a thermoformer, traysealer, or horizontal flowpacker. Additionally, we offer semi-automatic loading systems to suit your specific needs.
Packaging plays a key role in ensuring quality and hygiene throughout the food supply chain, from production to the consumer. GEA develops thermoforming packaging machines, labeling, marking and automation equipment to meet the high demands of food manufacturers.
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Del cubo de ordeño al robot: 100 años de innovación agrícola en GEA
Desde hace más de 100 años, GEA desarrolla tecnologías para la ganadería lechera, desde las primeras máquinas de ordeño con cubos hasta los sistemas autónomos y conectados digitalmente. Estas innovaciones han transformado radicalmente la ganadería lechera: se ha pasado de rutinas que exigían mucha mano de obra a una mayor productividad, un mejor bienestar animal y unas operaciones diarias más eficientes.
