PULSING with innovation

As the popularity of vegetarian and plant-based diets grows, consumers are falling in love with legumes. Legumes such as lentils, peas, chickpeas, beans, soybeans and peanuts are some of the best plant-based sources of protein available. The versatile legume is a popular base ingredient for many snack foods, including namkeen. Namkeen is a broad term for a range of salty snacks and encompasses products with whole legumes such as: green peas, chickpeas, peanuts, cashews, moong dal, lentils, and dough based extruded products.

The diversity of namkeen and its many ingredients presents a great opportunity for food processors. But the large number of ingredients, combinations and recipes for namkeen mean it can also be challenging to cook — without the right equipment.

After decades of working in the South Asian snacks market, we understand Namkeen. Our legume and extrusion processing solutions are specially designed to process the raw materials which make up this complex snack product.

HeatWave Snack Fryer

The HeatWave® Snack Fryer is a multi-purpose fryer which fries a variety of ingredients on the same line. It can fry nuts, pellets, namkeen and other snacks efficiently, while needing less system oil volume than a conventional fryer. HeatWave Snack Fryer innovates the traditional frying process by using curtains of clean filtered oil — to fry the snacks — instead of submersion.

As the oil enrobes the products, heat is transferred quickly and uniformly and less oil is needed to perfectly fry the product. This system also operates with the lowest oil volume of any continuous fryer.

A rapid rate of oil turnover (using only the cleanest filtered oil) is able to produce snacks with the freshest flavour and a long shelf life. A variety of product conveyor and infeed configurations are available and HeatWave also has infeed options; which can handle extruded noodles, batter coated peanuts, boondi, and a variety of nuts, peas and lentils.

The precise temperature control of this fryer adjusts rapidly to changes in product load, which allows oil temperature to be adjusted, and maintains a uniform temperature along the entire length of the fryer. The unique flexibility of the HeatWave Snack Fryer allows you to create custom temperature profiles, to process a wide variety of snacks, with different product characteristics.

When processing whole legumes (green peas) for example most have a skin and can be prone to thermal shock which results in significant fines during normal immersion style frying.

HeatWave’s customisable temperature profile combined with the in-built clean filtered oil curtains assists to minimise fines, and aids fines removal as oil passes over the product and through the conveyor. This superior oil filtration produces fresh flavoured snacks with long shelf life. Ideal applications for the HeatWave Snack Fryer include nuts, namkeen, peas, batter coated snacks, extruded and noodle snacks and pellet snacks.