BigPatents India

Catering is developing rapidly with the spread of lunch services in large firms and industries, central kitchens for chain restaurants and the lunch supply scheme for schools. Accordingly, the present age requires large cooking plants, which are continuous, automatic and hygienic. Presently batch type or semicontineous rice cooking units using jacketed kettles heated by steams is adopted in institutional cooking. Since the texture varies between batches a uniform product as desired by the consumer cannot be consistently prepared. These units are labor oriented and are not economical when large-scale applications are envisaged. Due to batch type operation the hygiene is also poor. Hence the need arises for the development of a continuous cooking unit having a large capacity along with circumventing above defects. The consumer preference for the product namely fluffy individual grains with cooked flavors or optimally cooked vegetables without the loss of their integrity have to be achieved consistently in the large-scale unit. Under the above said constraints, it is advantageous if a device is made availabe for which food products can be cooked within a short period of time and the cooked products are continuously made available for mass consumption.