Methods for calculating the duration of baking of minced meat products during heat treatment in convection ovens

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Saving energy resources, optimizing production processes and ensuring high quality of finished products are important tasks facing the food industry of the Republic of Belarus at the present stage of social and economic development. From this point of view, the current direction of scientific activity is development of methods for predicting duration of heat treatment of food products, which will allow to increase the level of production planning, implement production processes rationally, ensure production of finished products with high consumer parameters with no underheating or overheating of material of the processed bodies, and decrease the cost of energy resources for thermal processes. The paper proposes the method for theoretical calculation of baking duration for minced meat products in direct contact of the heating medium with the processed body in modern convection units. When developing a theoretical calculation, heat transfer processes are divided into internal and external. When describing internal heat transfer processes, changes in the thermal and physical characteristics of the material of the processed body are considered, determined by mass transfer processes and physical and chemical changes in structural elements with conversion of raw minced meat into finished product with baked crust. The processes of external heat exchange are described according to the operating parameters of modern convection ovens used in small and medium-sized enterprises of food industry and public catering. The values of duration of heat treatment on the example of products made of chicken mince at different temperatures of the heating medium are obtained. Special rod cassettes with a rigid thermocouple attachment design have been developed to ensure correct experiment. Deviations of baking duration values between the theoretically calculated and experimentally obtained values range from 1.49 to 4.44 % for different temperatures of heating medium, which indicates the efficiency of the developed technique. The proposed technique for calculating the duration of baking process for minced meat products when heated will allow optimizing production processes, saving energy resources and obtaining finished products with high consumer parameters. Acknowledgments. The research was carried out as part of the state program of scientific research “Quality and Efficiency of Agroindustrial Production”.