Chilling of recipe dish meals to meet cook-chill guidelines

Within Europe the most severe cooling guidelines for cook-chill products are those produced by the Department of Health in the United Kingdom. These guidelines recommend that 80-mm trays of product should be chilled to below 10 degrees C in 2.5h and that the smaller 40- and 10-mm trays should be chilled below 3 degrees C in 1.5 h. Trials were carried out to determine whether 10-, 40- or 80-mm deep trays of bolognese sauce could be cooled to below 3 degrees C within the guidelines. Assuming that surface freezing was to be avoided and a simple single-stage operation used, only the 10-mm tray could be chilled within these limits. A computer model was developed that produced predictions that were in good agreement with the experimental data. The program demonstrated that other foods, such as beef curry and chicken Italian, had similar cooling responses to those experimentally measured for bolognese sauce.