3 Commonly Asked Questions About Blast Freezing
Standard freezers are usually kept at the freezing point of water, 0°C, as specified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as the safe temperature to maintain them at. In the blast freezing process, food is placed in a blast freezer where the temperature is reduced from 70°C to -18°C in a period of 240 minutes or less. Blast freezing is an innovation that revolutionized commercial food production and storage.
- What Is the Point of Blast Freezing?
The process has numerous advantages. One is that it freezes food faster. This in turn improves the quality of frozen goods since longer freeze times result in larger ice crystals developing, which has the potential to damage the products, negatively affecting flavor and quality. Items that have undergone blast freezing may be moved into a regular freezer for long-term storage. Government legislation also currently mandates that food be cooled in as timely a manner as possible in order to head off the propagation of bacteria.
- What Industries Use Blast Freezing?
The food sector with its ice cream, frozen dinners and perishables is naturally the main beneficiary of this technology, particularly the areas of agriculture (crops could be sold all year round) and meat processing (including fish). Both manufacturers and restaurants often use them. Blast freezing was also an important advancement in the field of healthcare. It allowed the storage of medicines and vaccines that spoiled in hotter temperatures as well as the preservation of tissue and cell cultures.
- What Are the Different Types of Blast Freezers?
There are three kinds: They are variable retention type freezers, continuous freezers and blast cells. The first is a hybrid of the second and last type and has the ability to be programmed to take items with different freezing time requirements from many lines at various speeds. The second kind freezes products on a constantly in motion conveyor belt as they slide by. The final kind is composed of single units used to batch freeze large quantities at once.
Blast freezing is a valuable innovation that forever changed processing and storage.