Improving the performance of your batch oven is essential for improving product yields and consistency, as well as process efficiency.
When trying to improve your batch oven, there are three points of control to look at:
Making these three points of control work together will help refine your process.
We’ll walk you through how in this article.
Maintaining a food processing oven requires special tools to ensure the oven is operating at peak performance.
Evaluating air flow and speed, finding air leaks, setting dampers, determining static pressures and gas burner settings, and calibrating probes are normal, sometimes every day, maintenance tasks that require specialized tools.
Larger food processing companies likely already have these tools on hand. However, start-ups and smaller food processors may not have needed these oven maintenance tools before — and might not be equipped to properly maintain their oven when it is installed.
Commercial ovens, as with any food processing equipment, can pose serious safety hazards for employees.
Burns, pinch points, crush points, cuts, chemical burns, carbon dioxide suffocation, or being trapped in an oven while in the cook cycle are all possible if proper care is not taken when operating a commercial smokehouse, dehydrator, or steam oven — leading to serious injury or death.
As a food processing company, it is imperative that proper safety signs be posted on and around any commercial oven to notify employees of potential dangers associated with this piece of equipment.
A commercial smokehouse or dehydrator is a big investment — one that requires regular checks and maintenance to keep it running efficiently.
An oven designed to provide easy access to the components that require regular and preventative maintenance will reduce the time your team needs to upkeep the oven. The less amount of time spent maintaining and repairing an oven results in more cook time, more product, and more profits.
It’s important then that when you invest in a commercial smokehouse or dehydrator, you find one with components that are easy to access, easy to repair, and don’t need replacing as often.
A commercial smokehouse or dehydrator is a big investment — one that requires regular and ongoing maintenance to ensure a long oven life.
Commercial oven manufacturers provide information on how and what should be routinely inspected and maintained, but in many facilities, those instructions are often buried in a user manual that gets stuck in a drawer somewhere or made inaccessible to maintenance personnel.
Regular preventative maintenance is necessary to keep your oven operating for a long period of time.
The way trucks are loaded into a smokehouse or dehydrator greatly affects the creation and strength of the breakpoint — and can have a negative impact on the consistency of the product.
Anytime you add an object, like a smokehouse truck, into the flow of air, you change the way that airstream moves. It will either break apart or diminish if it’s hitting a wall, or it will flow around the object into a new path.
Overload product onto a truck and you’ll create a wall that prevents air from moving across the product. Under load product or trucks in the oven, and air will flow to the place of least resistance.
This is why it’s critically important to know the best ways to load trucks into a smokehouse or dehydrator.
Choosing the proper heat source for your product when purchasing a commercial smokehouse or dehydrator can be a daunting task.
What are the differences between heat sources? Which works best for what you’re trying to achieve? What heat source is going to be easy to maintain and inexpensive to run? What is the price difference between each heat source? Do you have the proper utilities already in your facility, or will you need to have more brought in?
There are a lot of aspects to consider when choosing the best heat source for your product. So where do you start?
Airflow is the most important feature of any industrial smokehouse or dehydrator.
It’s the airflow that is ultimately responsible for creating the breakpoint that in turn cooks product in the oven. The better the airflow, the stronger the breakpoint, and the more consistently product will cook — resulting in better yields, better coloring, and better texture.
The airflow is critically important to any cooking process, which means it’s critically important to be aware of any variations in airflow that may affect the creation of the breakpoint and result in inconsistent cooking.
But how do you do that? How do you know if the air is moving optimally in an oven? How can you determine if something is wrong with an oven and affecting the airflow?
The answer is simple.
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The smokehouse breakpoint is the most important aspect of any industrial oven.
This one feature is directly responsible for cooking your product, coloring your product, and either increasing or decreasing your product yields, depending on the strength and velocity of the breakpoint.
A strong breakpoint — one that makes it all the way across the cart to heat all product on that level — should be the main focus when investing in a smokehouse, as it results in a more consistent product, as each piece of product is receiving the same amount of airflow.
But how do you know if a smokehouse will have a strong breakpoint?
There’s something to be said for buying an industrial oven that is manufactured and serviced in America.
Putting aside the fact that American made means you’re supporting the creation and maintaining of jobs here in America, there are a number of benefits that come with the Made in America stamp on your industrial oven.
Greater quality, better customer service, and the ease of customization are just a few highlights of purchasing an industrial oven from an American manufacturer. But that’s not all!
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