Food or edible material: processes – compositions – and products – Surface coated – fluid encapsulated – laminated solid... – Isolated whole seed – bean or nut – or material derived therefrom
Reexamination Certificate
1999-09-08
2002-04-02
Tran, Lien (Department: 1761)
Food or edible material: processes, compositions, and products
Surface coated, fluid encapsulated, laminated solid...
Isolated whole seed, bean or nut, or material derived therefrom
C426S275000, C426S283000, C426S496000, C426S506000, C426S523000, C426S549000, C099S484000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06365210
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to the field of bakery products and methods and apparatus for baking such products, and more particularly to new and improved parbaked pizza crust and improved apparatus and process for making same.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention primarily relates to the manufacture of pizza, a well-known type of leavened pastry usually consisting of a sheet of dough, baked with a covering of tomato sauce, cheese, seasoning and oil. As it is a relatively thin, flat sheet of dough in which the yeast has already worked, only a few minutes are required for the baking, and it is usually served hot. Nevertheless, this simple popular dish presents certain difficulties in any pizza carry-out store and in food service establishments such as restaurants where a considerable number of patrons all want their pizza at substantially the same time. As ordinarily made, it requires a specially trained baking cook with certain manual dexterity, who is rushed for awhile and then may have little or nothing to do for long periods of the day. When made in the traditional way, the dough can be mixed and proofed in advance, with the risen dough kept in a cooler; but it is not practical to form, fill and bake in advance, since the filling would lose its freshness. The filling also affects the baking of the center of the dough as distinguished from the rim. Under such conditions, small restaurants cannot afford a pizza cook.
The prior art solves the problem to some extent by making possible the advance partial cooking, by various par-baking processes, of the sheets of dough pressed and/or molded in their traditional form, including a naturally risen rim, so that the dish can be mostly prepared in advance and handled during the rush as a brown-and-serve item. This also makes possible the packaging and sale of pizzas for home cooking as a brown-and-serve item so that the average housewife can cook and serve it as a family dish. The formed dough is rather tough, particularly before the final browning, so that it will stand handling and shipment, while the ingredients for the filling can be included in sealed plastic bags. The housewife has merely to spread them on the pastry, heat to brown the dough, and serve. The process is even quicker in a restaurant, where the raw filling is available in quantity.
Although pizza is also a popular item in restaurants and pizzerias, these places most often also lack the facilities and/or labor for making the pizza crusts because they must be rolled out and prebaked before application of sauce and topping materials. For this reason, pizza crusts are often purchased from large manufacturers of crusts, partially baked, and the restaurants and pizzerias subsequently apply sauce and topping filling materials, and then bake the filled crust shortly before serving to the customer.
The crust manufacturers make partially baked (parbaked) pizza crusts in large volume, and then ship them to distributors, often over considerable distances, even by transcontinental shipping. The distributors then deliver the crusts to the restaurants and pizzerias. The partially baked pizza crusts are stored under refrigeration, both during shipping and in the restaurant prior to use, where the amount of refrigerated storage space is often severely limited.
Thus, over the years the tomato pie, or as it is more commonly known, the pizza pie or simply pizza, has become a truly national food. The popularity of the pizza today has so accelerated that it probably enjoys a pre-eminence equal to that of the hotdog or to that of popcorn. In keeping with the ever increasing demand for pizza, the food industry has converted what was traditionally a food requiring many hours of preparation into a fast food product. This has resulted in placing a variety of pizza products on the market, each of which, although for the most part a frozen food, invariably claims to provide an authentic pizza which is the equivalent of any pizza made-to-order, that is to say, a pizza which is made from freshly made dough.
In order to take advantage of this growing market, a number of companies have produced frozen pizzas for marketing to supermarkets and grocery stores. Some companies further market their frozen pizzas to fast food chains, as well as restaurants. These uncooked frozen pizza products, however, have not been found to be satisfactory. Upon cooking, such frozen pizzas have not displayed the spongy texture and freshness achieved with fresh cooked pizza. In addition, storage stability with many of these products is a problem and, therefore, such products can only be kept fresh by including large amounts of preservatives. However, as consumers become more health conscious, they become less accepting of products which employ such preservatives. Thus, the search for frozen products which display the taste and texture of fresh pizza, and can be stored without quantities of preservatives, has continued.
It has long been appreciated by those individuals skilled in the culinary art of frozen pizza making, that all of the ingredients which combine to make a pizza, the dough is by far the most important. Ideally the dough should retain a structure and texture as closely characteristic to freshly baked dough as possible, even though the pizza is purchased in a frozen state. In this way the consumer is assured of purchasing a product which closely matches a made-to-order pizza.
Much research and development effort has therefore been expended in the last several decades in efforts to make economically available a method which when practiced will yield a pizza which compares satisfactorily to a made-to-order pizza. None of the attempts in this area of which we are aware can actually claim to have succeeded in their efforts in this regard, i.e., none of these will yield a pizza which satisfactorily compares to a made-to-order pizza and that can be economically manufactured on a mass production basis in an automated facility.
One of the popular processes for providing factory pre-made pizzas has been the aforementioned manufacture by crust makers of partially baked pizza crusts in large volume using the developments in the par-baking arts that initiated with Gregor U.S. Pat. No. 2,549,595, the 1951 pioneer par-baking patent, which is incorporated herein by reference. The par-bake process in the Gregor patent was developed for making what became known as “Brown and Serve” French bread. This type of food product has become very popular in terms of providing in supermarkets and to the food service industry semi-baked dinner rolls and various sweet rolls that have become popular retail food items. These semi-baked goods, when browned at relatively high oven temperatures in the home, or in restaurants or other food service facilities, are of excellent quality and flavor and have found wide acceptance by housewives and food service customers due not only to their palatability but also to the ease of which they were prepared in the restaurant or other food service facility, as well as in the home.
In conventional brown and serve practice, any standard dough for baked goods is divided into the desired size and semi/baked at a bakery under controlled conditions of temperature and baking time so as to substantially fully cook the dough while avoiding the formation of a crust on the outer surface and avoiding browning of the outer surface. More particularly, the baking conditions are adjusted so as to substantially complete gelatinization of the starch and liberation of carbon dioxide by yeast action and to then arrest the yeast action. The semi-baked product then has sufficient rigidity to withstand removal from the oven and subsequent handling and packaging without collapsing. In addition, the semi-baked product has a relatively high moisture content if compared to a fully baked product. The consumer prepares the product for eating by a final baking step during which the desired crust and browning of the same is obtained and during which the moisture content is reduced to that of a freshly-baked item
Pakulski Jeffrey R.
Schaible, II John E.
M & M Holdings, Inc.
Reising Ethington, Barnes, Kisselle, Learman & McCulloch, P.C.
Tran Lien
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