Video cook tomato pizza sauce topping with Steam Infusion
Who doesn't like pizza? It's a food with global appeal and now food manufacturers are using Steam Infusion to cook tomato-based pizza sauces to enhance all those brilliant Italian flavours. Chris Brooks, development chef at OAL, explains how we cook pizza sauce with Steam Infusion.
Pizza sauce with Steam Infusion: process & recipe
To cook up pizza sauce with Steam Infusion we add all our ingredients to the cooking vessel, saving the starch slurry to later. In this recipe we're adding:
Sunflower oil
Garlic
Onion
Lemon juice
Tomato purée
Herbs and spices
We then turn the Steam Infusion lance on and start to heat and mix the product with the Vaction Pump in the vessel. Once we hit 70°C (158°F) (for our 300kg (661lb) batch this took roughly five minutes) we add our starch slurry and gently heat to 90°C (194°F). This give us a total cook time of less than seven minutes!
Fast Steam Infusion sauce cooking
With Steam Infusion we can put more energy into your sauce than traditional technologies so we reach 90°C faster and shorten cook times. This helps us mimic homemade style cooking because the cook times are more representative of how we cook at home. The high-speed heating and mixing environment extracts flavours and locks them into your sauce so it packs that lovely oregano punch.
No burn-on cooking
Unlike a traditional steam jacket, we’re heating from the centre and don’t expose the ingredients to excess temperature. If you think about your traditional steam jacketed pan - ingredients can see temperatures in excess of 130°C - and hence the problems of burn on to the surface. Steam Infusion cooking stops burn-on and Maillard reactions so your product tastes fresher and the vessel is easier to clean.