Design, Construction and Testing of Potato Cubes Drying and Puffing Unit Using Heated Air Fluidized Bed System
Arvind B. Katakdond1, Narendra Shah2 and Kannan N. Iyer3
1Research Assistant, CTARA, IIT Bombay, Mumbai 400 076, India.
a_katakdond@iitb.ac.in
2 Associate Professor, CTARA, IIT Bombay, Mumbai 400 076, India.
nshah@iitb.ac.in
3Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Bombay, Mumbai 400 076, India.
kiyer@me.iitb.ac.in
ABSTRACT
Potato can be processed into a variety of food products such as chips, flakes, granules, powder, french fries, dehydrated dice and puffed cubes. Puffed Potato cubes bring in the advantage of texture, crispness and we propose it as oil-free RTE (Ready to eat) snacks. This paper reports the process and product development describing the HTST (High Temperature Short time) method employing a heated air fluidized bed technique for making puffed Potato cubes. One cubic centimeter potato cubes were blanched, sulfited, dried initially for about 90 min in air at 60°C (tested using both fluidized bed and cabinet driver) puffed in a high temperature fluidized bed (170°C) and then dried for about 80 minutes at 90°C to bring the final product of desired moisture level of 5% wet basis (wb). Blanching and drying method influenced the degree of expansion of the puffed potato cubes. The resulting puffed product was optimized in terms of volume expansion ratio and structure retention ability in storage. Parametric study using lab scale models (40g, 500g and 5000g) suggest that the optimized process has similar drying history.
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