Safe cooking and reheating

Cooking and reheating instructions must provide consumers with a product that is microbiologically safe. They should also ensure that the product is of the required sensory and nutritional quality. Our service for developing and validating cooking instructions - for use with microwave and conventional ovens - continued to be heavily used in 2007. Greg Hooper of the Department of Food Manufacturing Technologies explains:

"The quality and safety of heated products doesn´t just depend on the effort spent creating them - it also requires the right packaging and heating instructions. Many potentially great products are spoilt by poor packaging shape and materials or inadequately developed reheating instructions. We can test products in an extensive range of calibrated systems including domestic and catering appliances, gas, electric and fan assisted ovens, gas and electric hobs and grills, toasters, and microwave and combination ovens.

Using our knowledge from 20 years of cooking instruction development, we can optimise microwave and conventional instructions to attain a safely cooked product of optimum quality. We follow procedures documented under ISO 9001 to monitor the time-temperature history of the product using thermocouple or fibre optic temperature measurement data logging. The accuracy of temperature measurements is ensured by use of calibrated systems traceable to UKAS standards."

In a major project drawing upon these and other skills, the Food Standards Agency commissioned CCFRA to determine the optimum conditions for the fan-assisted oven cooking of unstuffed turkey, chicken, goose and duck - in preparation for its Christmas-time advice.

The birds were cooked using appropriate standardised cooking criteria - for example, breast up, use of seasoning, the use and removal of foil, and piercing to allow fat to drain. During cooking the temperature was measured at various points within each bird - to assess cooking regimes for the time taken to achieve 72C. Assessments were also included to determine microbiological safety and sensory quality.

The data obtained for each poultry type were then assessed to establish recommended cooking times and instructions - expressed as a time in minutes per kilo for three sizes of poultry.