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A balanced bake makes perfect Better baking for biscuits and cookies means matching the intended baking curve of the product, stage by stage, consistently and efficiently. With its Emithermic oven, Reading Bakery Systems provides complete control over five baking parameters that create a more balanced bake.
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Flexibility is essential when the task is baking cookies and biscuits that can greatly vary in characteristics. Reading Bakery System’s Emithermic oven can be optimized for each type of product in this segment by controlling and combining five parameters on each oven zone: temperature, upper and lower air circulation, exhaust, and heating source. The Emithermic oven is a fairly new innovation combining traditional baking concepts and different equipment designs with the flexibility and efficiency of modern technology, enabling control over the different stages in the baking profile of a biscuit or a cookie, from development, through to setting, and drying and coloring. Each of these stages has different requirements from the oven, which generates different effects on the product while fine-tuning parameters to the item’s profile. To accomplish this, flexibility is a must – especially regarding the different types of baking that it can provide, which should include both radiant and convective heating. The goal is to achieve a balanced bake efficiently, and this is reached by targeting each of the baking stages. “The Emithermic oven offers bakers the flexibility to have both radiant and convective baking and a combination of the two in order to target the development and setting stages with a high degree of accuracy, in comparison with an oven based on just one of the two heating technologies. It gives bakers the control and flexibility to create a baking profile that is best suited for the requirements of the specific product throughout the baking stages,” Joe Pocevicius, European sales manager, Reading Bakery Systems, explained in an interview. As it incorporates capabilities for both radiant baking (best suited for wire-cut and deposited cookies, for example) and convective baking (the choice for hard and soft biscuits), manufacturers with all types of cookies and biscuits in their portfolio stand to benefit the most from this technology, as it can easily switch between baking modes. The PRISM Emithermic Oven Zone blueprints A typical oven zone can be designed in different lengths ranging from 9 to 18 meters. Each zone of the oven can also be configured according to the product’s baking cycle and according to the stages within the baking cycle: developing, setting, and drying and coloring. For example, a three-zone oven could be configured so that the first zone mainly targets
www.bakingbiscuit.com 01/2021
the product’s development stage. In this case, the first zone would have predominantly radiant baking to maintain humidity and support the development of the chemical reactions responsible for creating the flavors.
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The second zone fulfills the needs of the setting stage, meaning it provides a combination of radiant and convective heating. With the chemical reactions completed, the focus is now on creating the shape and structure of the product, for which less radiant baking is needed. This is also the beginning of the drying process. The third oven zone can provide convective heating exclusively for the final baking stage, so that the remaining moisture is extracted as quickly and efficiently as possible for the drying and coloring of the product. While it can achieve three types of baking (radiant, convective, and conductive), the operating principle of the Emithermic oven is similar to that of convective forced air ovens. Each oven zone has a combustion penthouse where the air is directly heated using a gas burner, electric burner, or an alternate heat source. “We typically don’t use heat exchangers in order to maximize heat value,” Pocevicius explains. The hot air is then distributed to an air channel above the product and an air channel below the product. The lower channel blows air underneath the product belt and convectively heats the belt. The hot belt then conductively bakes
