Oven, fryer and smokehouse equipment suppliers continually are improving the design to minimize the gap between what processors want their cooking equipment to do and what the machines are capable of doing. For example, in ovens, some of the more significant advancements are the ability to understand and better incorporate the four main components of thermal processing: dry-bulb temperature, wet-bulb temperature, air velocity and cooking time.
Although these thermal-processing components are not new concepts, advancements in managing the details of these four elements have helped improve processes and products through speeding up processing times, improving process efficiency and product quality, and advancing other aspects that impact yield, says Jeff Sindelar, extension meat specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.