Upgrade existing plant for milk and cream hard candy
Date: 15 January 2004
Small investment extends the product range
Leading confectionery makers throughout the world are taking advantage of a technique developed by Baker Perkins to upgrade existing cooking plant, and produce the increasingly popular high milk and cream content hard candy.
For the hundreds of confectionery makers already producing candies on a 'Microfilm' plant, a small investment in a pre-cooking and milk and cream injection system will add high milk candies to their product range.
The process is effective on both sugar and sugar-free applications; there is no reduction on throughput on sugar applications.
The main difficulty with producing high milk solids recipes has been the processing need for scraped heat exchanger surfaces so that burn-on of milk protein can be avoided. Failure to use scraped surfaces on these recipes necessitates frequent and lengthy plant shutdown so that costly detergent cleaning can take place.
The development that allows a long production time between wash downs, and retains the capacity of an existing 'Microfilm' cooker, is to split the cooking process into two stages.
The first stage involves using a coil cooker or a plate heat exchanger, as used for standard sugar and glucose only recipes. This is installed before an existing 'Microfilm' cooker. For a high milk recipe, a simple syrup with the milk cream and butter omitted can then be pre-cooked through this stage with no fear of burn-on.
After the initial pre-cook the dairy ingredients are injected into this simple syrup via the vapour separator. This is where moisture from the pre-cook is driven off.
The last evaporative stage takes place in the 'Microfilm' cooker, which is a falling-film swept surface evaporator. Here the milk solids, now uniformly dispersed within the syrup, can be handled without burn-on.
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