Cook and Chill
Cook and Chill , in German cooking and cooling , is originally a technical term for a process of communal catering , in which the immediate serving of the food can be dispensed with. This is in contrast to conventional warm meals, in which the food is served immediately after preparation or kept warm until it is consumed. In technical jargon, these processes are referred to as cook and serve or cook and hold , in German cooking and serving or cooking and (warm) keeping .
The procedure
In the Cook and Chill process (also: cook-chill or CC), the warm food components are prepared and cooked in the conventional way, but then cooled to a temperature of below 4 ° C within 90 minutes. This is called rapid cooling. The chilled food can be stored for up to four days without loss of quality if the cold chain is uninterrupted. It is only warmed up to consumption temperature immediately before serving. This process is known in technical terms as regeneration.
The advantages of the Cook & Chill system include: a. also the associated hygienic safety in accordance with the requirements of the HACCP concept ( Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Point ) that came into force in 1998 . The multiplication of pathogenic germs as well as the formation of toxins is prevented by quickly crossing the hygienically questionable temperature range when lowering from approx. 40 to 10 ° C. This is v. a. in the field of hospitals and old people's homes, as the immune system of many patients is weakened.
Application and market
Cook and Chill was developed in the USA in the 1960s and made its way to Europe in the 1970s, where it was further developed, especially in Sweden. From the mid-1980s, the use of various forms of cook and chill began to revolutionize public catering worldwide. The trade journal gv-praxis wrote at the time: "If there was a word to choose from in 1995 for communal catering, it would definitely be cook chill - so chilled food." In 1997, the Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe (BSR) was one of the first large companies in Germany to introduced this method in their company catering. Initially, it was mainly used in patient catering in hospitals and old people's homes. Cook and Chill is also increasingly gaining ground in the catering industry, in the banquet area of hotels and in event catering.
Such dishes can now be found more and more often in the offerings of large supermarket chains. So u. a. the ready meals for Weight Watchers and the Feinstes line are made by the master chef of the Munich TV and star chef Alfons Schuhbeck using this process. In Great Britain, take-aways specializing in cook and chill are very popular.
Economical meaning
Compared to the frozen food industry with an estimated annual turnover of three billion for Germany, this branch of ready meals is still relatively small. Sales of Cook and Chill products in Germany are currently estimated at around 100 million euros per year.
literature
- Cook and Chill - Investigation and Evaluation of a Catering System, Volker Peinelt, Günter Wentzlaff and Georg Wittlich (eds.), Shaker Verlag , 2004
- Sous Vide and Cook-Chill Processing for the Food Industry , Sue Ghazala, Springer-Verlag, 1998
- A comparison of chilled-holding versus frozen storage on quality and wholesomness of some prepared foods , C. Kossovitsas, M. Navab, Charlotte M. Chang, GE Livingston, Journal of Food Science, Vol. 38, Issue 5, 1973
- Cook & Chill - Cooking with a system , Ekkehart Lehmann, Hans-Dieter Werlein, ISBN 3-8308-0452-0 , aid infodienst, 2004