Pickles sterilization

Pickles are fresh vegetables by the salt pickled pickles billet, reoccupy squeeze or soaked with water to reduce salinity method, pull out excess salt water (salt) in pickle billet, reduce the salinity of the billet, and then use different sauce (yellow soybean paste, sweet bean sauce, etc.) or soy to sauce, make the sauce of sugars, amino acids, aromatic gas seep into the pickle billet, to become a great taste, rich nutrition of pickles, pickles contain lactic acid bacteria and other healthy substances, and also has special aroma, is loved by people all the year round dish.

Pickles in the fermentation process will produce lactic acid bacteria, which has the good function for children, middle-aged and elderly digestion, regulation of gastrointestinal, is also a good appetizer. It is difficult to avoid the harmful microorganisms exceeding the standard in the production of traditional pickles, which is harmful to health and also affects the storage of pickles. More and more manufacturers choose microwave equipment to complete pickles sterilization.

There are many kinds of pickles in China, and they are widely distributed. The famous producing areas are mainly kaifeng qi county, linyi hedong, ji ‘an, jiangsu yangzhou, zhenjiang, anhui xuancheng, etc. Linyi is known as the hometown of pickles, and the pickles produced are exported to Japan and Australia. Due to the continuous improvement of living standards and the accelerated pace of life, there is a great demand for all kinds of small packaged snack foods and specialty foods (such as bean products, marinated products, pickled products, pickles, pickled vegetables, etc.). At the same time, the product quality requirements are also very high, color, aroma, taste, and the requirements of the nutritional ingredients of the product need to maximize the reservation, and can not be excessive use of preservatives, but also to meet the shelf life of the product, so brought certain difficulties to the manufacturers. In the sterilization and preservation of packaged food, microwave penetration, does not destroy nutrients and low temperature sterilization and other characteristics, showing obvious superiority.

Linyi Mr. Song saw the development trend of pickles. In order to improve the quality of pickles and enhance the competitiveness, the company two people brought bottled pickles samples to our factory for inspection, and did pickles sterilization experiments.

Due to the pickles bottles are taller, we selected a 6KW box microwave equipment simulation experiment. Take two pickles of the same size, about 250ml, put them into the box device, turn on the microwave, set the temperature at 70℃, observe the temperature control display, and keep the temperature rising for 3 minutes. Measure the temperature of pickles bottle at 74℃, with no bulge at the top of the lid, and the effect is good. Then put 400ml bottle into the equipment. Considering that the bottle is slightly larger, adjust the temperature appropriately to 75 degrees, and keep it up to the set temperature for four minutes. Take out and measure the surface temperature at 78℃, which is in line with the sterilization process requirements. The color of the experimental sample is consistent with that before the experiment, which is satisfactory and meets the customer’s requirements.

According to customer’s production and venues, need a 60 kw water-cooled equipment to meet demand, considering the height of the pickles bottles, import and export of microwave limiter need to increase to 15 to 20 centimeters, prevent leak wave, microwave limiter respectively corresponding to lengthen 1.8 meters, this will lead to the tail does not have enough space, affect the work, so we adds a lateral transfer device to the customer again, solves the problem of space. The microwave equipment is also suitable for sterilization of pickles in bags. The microwave temperature and time can be increased or decreased according to the quantity.

Conventional thermal sterilization of microwave sterilization equipment is through heat conduction, convection or radiation to transfer heat from the surface of the material to the internal, to reach the sterilization temperature, often need a long time. And microwave sterilization is through the direct reaction of microwave energy with bacteria and other microorganisms in the material, thermal effect and non-thermal effect work together, to achieve the purpose of rapid heating, treatment time is greatly shortened. The sterilization time of various materials is generally 3 to 5 minutes, and the sterilization temperature is 70 to 90 degrees. It is characterized by short time and fast speed. Uniform and thorough sterilization, low temperature sterilization, and can maintain the nutrients and flavor of materials, energy conservation and environmental protection, simple operation of equipment, good controllability, advanced technology. Microwave sterilization can be divided into post-packaging sterilization and pre-packaging sterilization. Packaging containers should not be made of metallic materials, but medium materials should be used. Generally use plastic packaging or glass, engineering plastic texture containers are appropriate. In order to prevent bag swelling in the process of microwave sterilization, the equipment can apply pressure in the warehouse using reverse pressure sterilization process, which can prevent bag swelling loss. At the same sterilization temperature, the microwave equipment required sterilization time is short, do not need to preheat. For example, the killing time of escherichia coli is about 30S. Under the same sterilization conditions, the killing temperature is relatively low, and the sterilization effect is extremely significant. It can carry out the whole sterilization on the list of sterilized materials at the same time, greatly shorten the sterilization cycle, and ensure the consistency of sterilization. Due to the simultaneous sterilization of various parts of the material, the sterilization time is short, which can avoid the impact of long heating on food quality, especially for food that should not be sterilized at a higher temperature or for a longer heating time.