Recently, the US Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Bureau issued a recall notice, mainly to recall unqualified frozen raw beef dumplings produced without inspection, about 2,300 pounds. It can be seen that the quality and safety of food are both foreign and domestic. As a half northerner, dumplings are the author's 'good heart'. Unlike other people, the author prefers the industrialized production of quick-frozen dumplings compared to hand-made dumplings. So, is the automated production of dumplings safe? Follow the author's footsteps and walk into a dumpling production workshop to see it!
Into the dumpling production workshop, what shocked the author is that there is almost no worker who can make dumplings in the workshop. Instead, it is an unmanned intelligent automatic production line, from noodle, noodles, skinning, vegetable selection, stuffing, Stuffing, packaging, placing, sterilization, quick freezing, packaging, testing, etc., the whole process can be described in one go, such a production line, can produce tens of thousands of dumplings in an hour.
Into the 'unmanned workshop' to explore the safety of automatic production of dumplings or not
According to the person in charge, in many food and beverage production processes, it is easy for people to contaminate the products with microorganisms such as bacteria, let alone hand-made dumplings. Now using advanced mechanical equipment instead of labor, not only does it achieve 24 hours a day, High level of operation, increased production efficiency, labor costs, and the safety and hygiene of dumpling production.
We know that handmade dumplings want to ensure that the shape, weight and size of the dumplings are uniform. For example, 22 grams of each dumpling, no less than 1 gram per liter, to meet this requirement, the worker's experience and skill requirements are very high, at least practice. 3 months. However, through the application of the skinning machine and the stuffing machine, not only can we design the thickness of the dumpling skin, the thickness of the filling, and the weight, so as to ensure the uniformity of the product specifications, standard, and special process development, making the dumplings of the leather making mechanism Whether it is from the tensile strength, toughness, or breakage rate, the leather is better than the manual suede.
After I saw the dough passing through the dough, pressing the dough, and making the skin, the dumpling skin was sequentially distributed to the stuffing machine through the conveyor, and the filling prepared by the vacuum mixing device was also poured into the stuffing device. According to the production needs of different products and the weight and size of the required fillings, the size of the filling outlet can be adjusted, and the double-stage screw is used to transport the filling material to make the filling more uniform, and the filling of the filling is avoided in a certain process. Together affect the beauty of the dumplings.
The packaged dumplings came to the placement process through the conveyor. I saw a few soft pneumatic gripper movements, and the shaped dumplings were accurately placed in the dumpling box. When I saw this robotic arm, I thought of Disney. Develop software robotic arms to avoid personal injury and hardware damage. Of course, dumplings also need such a soft mechanical gripper. The pressure sensor inside each finger allows the robot to know the strength of the fingertip grip and then adjust the fingertips. Action, this will not cause damage to the dumplings.
After the soft pneumatic gripper is placed, the dumplings need to be sterilized by a sterilizer, so that the finished dumplings can be protected from microbial infections, and then the dumplings come to the quick-freezing section. The staff introduced that compared to the traditional freezing equipment. The quick-freezing machine can freeze the mass-produced dumplings in a short time, and ensure that the nutrients are not lost, the phase and color are unchanged. In addition, the low-temperature quick-frozen to maintain the food quality does not require any additives (such as preservatives). Thereby ensuring that dumplings are safe to eat.
In order to ensure the quality of the finished product dumplings, after the dumplings are packaged in packaging equipment, they need to be 'baptized' by x-ray and metal foreign object detectors to prevent foreign matter in the production process (like metal labels, mesh screen wires, metal fragments, Powder materials, etc.) are mixed into dumplings, which are difficult to remove by the naked eye. Only through professional metal detectors, the products are automatically tested bag by bag, and the unqualified products are automatically removed to ensure the quality and safety of the food.
Experience: From raw material selection to production, each process of dumplings is strictly monitored, plus advanced food equipment, as well as artificial intelligence robots here to achieve a perfect transformation from food to finished dumplings. It also makes the author more convinced that through automation, intelligent, unmanned production, it can greatly reduce the 'human risk' brought by traditional hand-made dumplings, thus ensuring the quality and safety of quick-frozen dumplings.