HACCP : High-temperature cooking
Hello, I am Quality Manager in a handmade shortbread biscuits factory. In our HACCP study, the cooking step is a CCP. It states that we have to cook the biscuits at 150°C during 18 min at least to eliminate the microbial flora. Unfortunately there was no temperature sensor to control it, so I bought one calibrated sensor which is recommended for HACCP. My issue is that the only possibility is to fix the sensor against the wall of the rack oven : the measured temperature is way below the real temperature (in the center of the oven).
Do people using a rotating rack oven have a simple way to fix a sensor in the middle of the oven so the temperature is more accurate? There is no way to weld a bracket because the oven is made of stainless steel... Either way it seems that the temperature inside the oven fluctuates a lot during the cooking time. Is our critical limit relevant? I have never met the person who has drawn up the HACCP study so I don't really know how she determined these limits. Only a few analysis have been conducted on our final products (microbiological analysis and aw) and the results were compliant with our standards. However I am not sure it would be sufficient for the requirement of HACCP. Would a lower temperature still be able to destroy microbiological flora (especially yeast and mould) ? Is there a study or some reliable information that could justify that we lower the critical temperature? Thanks in advance.
get a new convection oven with a sensor.
get a new convection oven with a sensor.
That is not an option as we have not the budget for it. The oven have a sensor integrated but it is nos calibrated and very unprecise : it has no value for CCP control
Get a new sensor that can be calibrated??
Dear LauraNutrianne,
pls crosscheck whether baking can be a CCP under this conditions.
Baking will reduce the number of micros (not eliminate the micro flora). Important would be to eliminate pathogens (the viable form)/reduce to the no detection level.
What's about validation and verification?
What does 150°C mean? Where measured? Important would be the core temperature/holding time of the product and in this context size/weight of a single product and the position in the oven/on the belt. What's about temperature distribution in the oven? Moisture inside to be regulated by opening/closing slides?
What is the final product specification, especially the moisture/water activity?
etc.
If a biscuit fulfills final specification e.g. water content 10-20%, colour etc. is an indirect check that baking conditions were ok.
If you are baking a cake (water activity e.g. 0,7-0,8) you can use in-situ product probes for validation runs at worst case position.
Rgds
moskito
Hello, I am Quality Manager in a handmade shortbread biscuits factory. In our HACCP study, the cooking step is a CCP. It states that we have to cook the biscuits at 150°C during 18 min at least to eliminate the microbial flora. Unfortunately there was no temperature sensor to control it, so I bought one calibrated sensor which is recommended for HACCP. My issue is that the only possibility is to fix the sensor against the wall of the rack oven : the measured temperature is way below the real temperature (in the center of the oven).
Do people using a rotating rack oven have a simple way to fix a sensor in the middle of the oven so the temperature is more accurate? There is no way to weld a bracket because the oven is made of stainless steel... Either way it seems that the temperature inside the oven fluctuates a lot during the cooking time. Is our critical limit relevant? I have never met the person who has drawn up the HACCP study so I don't really know how she determined these limits. Only a few analysis have been conducted on our final products (microbiological analysis and aw) and the results were compliant with our standards. However I am not sure it would be sufficient for the requirement of HACCP. Would a lower temperature still be able to destroy microbiological flora (especially yeast and mould) ? Is there a study or some reliable information that could justify that we lower the critical temperature? Thanks in advance.
Hi Laura,
Baking not my area of expertise but for typical HACCP, the basic requirement for yr cooking CCP is that the temperature/time used should be validated. This exercise as discussed below involves a significant amount of work. I deduce from yr OP that you do not yet possess a validation document ?
The usual operational requirement to perform a validation requires measurement of the product core temperature, not the oven temperature.
The oven temperature is I presume used for routine production however needs initially to be correlated with product temperature.
A popular, explanatory, free, reference source for implementing the above validation is a baking website which is linked at the end of this article -
https://www.snackand...-baking-process
Filling in some data into the linked AIB website and selecting an appropriate baked item enables download of a dedicated validation calculator. A video tutorial explains use of the downloaded material.
One obvious difficulty in yr case is that the video assumes a datalogger is available. Lacking such may involve a lot of manual manoeuvring.
Other baking experts here may be able to offer a simplified approach. I hope so. :smile:
PS - the overall procedure involved is available by clicking the "read the procedures" text on this page -