How to Make Carrot Chips Industrially？
In the factory, carrot chips processing production line’s main procedures are material selecting→elevator→cleaning→elevator→blanching→cutting→dehydrating→mixing with sugar→pickling→drying→frying→deoiling→packaging. Carrot chips’ key processing technologies are frying & drying methods, hot air circulation drying is the traditional drying way, with the strengths of high thermal efficiency and low cost, another typical technology is vacuum frying method which could fast dry carrot and keep carrot’s bright color. These two methods will be discussed together with the rest processing steps of carrot chips.
1. Material strimming
Equipment: knife, plastic basket.
Choose the fresh and mature materials. Cut off carrots’ tops, bottoms and bad spots with a knife.
2. Quality inspection
Equipment: elevator, working table.
Check the selected materials and return the materials with rotten spots or green tops back to step 1.
3. Brush cleaning
Equipment: 2 brush type washer and peeler machines.
Carrots would be washed and peeled by a machine to remove the dirt on its surface. The combined brushing of two machines could clean carrots’ surface thoroughly.
4. Blanching
Equipment: blanching machine.
Temperature: 95-100℃
Time：6-8mins
The elevator will send carrots to blanch until the water is boiled. The worker should inspect the blanching machine for at least 30 minutes each time to prevent carrots from being high temperature scalded.
5. Cutting
Equipment: carrot slicing machine
The carrots could be cut into different shapes and sizes by our slicing machine, and the sizes are adjustable from 0.5mm to 10mm. In this production line, carrot’s thickness is 3mm. With our multifunctional carrot cutter, the factory can produce slices with perfect outlook, avoid injury to hand cutting and enhance efficiency.
6. Dehydrating
Equipment: carrot chips dehydrating machine
The dehydrating machine adopts the physical centrifugal method to remove the surface water from carrot slices. Four capacity for you to choose: 8-10kg/time, 15-20kg/time, 25-30kg/time and 35-40kg/time.
7. Sugar mixing and pickling
Equipment: carrot mixing machine, carrot pickling machine
Pour the dehydrated slices into mixing machine, then add sugar to mix with the carrot. Next, the carrot mixture needs to be pickled for 1-2 hours. The proportion of carrot and sugar is 15:1 or based on market’s and customer’s requirements.
8. Drying
Equipment: hot air circulation drying oven
Working principle: The machine adopts fan to supply continuous air, then, the air will be sent to the heater to get hot wind, next, the hot air will be blown through air channel into the drying chamber. Hot air dryer has open type drying oven and fully enclosed type drying oven. Please note: the closed type hot air dryer has circulation fan when the hot air has been dried and out from the chamber, it will be inhaled into the channel and sent to the heater to get hot air again.
Place the slices evenly on the trays of drying trolley, after that, pull the trolley into the drying chamber. We have tested that, carrot drying at 75℃ with a hot wind speed of 1 m/s can make the preservation rate of carotene increased by 10.86%. Hot air circulation dryer is suitable for evaporating material’s free moisture in the former phase, carrots’ water content will be quickly taken out from material and exhausted outside by the circulating hot air. What’s more, our machine is equipped with automatic temperature control system, when the temperature reaches the set degree gradually, the heater will temporarily stop working and chamber’s temperature will keep at a constant degree, which can produce a product with uniform quality and with no heat loss. Finally, carrot’s water content could be reduced to around 10%.
Next, in order to improve dried vegetable chips’ flavor and crispness. We will use vacuum fryer to deep process carrot chips in the following step. Drying in advance could largely shorten frying time.
9. Frying
Equipment: vacuum frying machine
Working principle: Frying is a dry process of cooking which does not involve water. Vacuum frying happens at below atmospheric pressure, the boiling point of water reduces. Therefore, the required temperature of frying carrot in vacuum dryer is lower than frying at atmospheric pressure, the frying time gets shortened. What’s more, the oxygen content in the vacuum system is relatively low, oxygen’s oxidation effects on carrot chips could be largely weakened, for example, the harmful effects of fatty acid spoilage and enzymatic browning on chips will reduce.
Place the dried carrot chips into vacuum fryer to get fried. The machine’s vacuum degree could be controlled to 0.08MPa; The oil temperature can be set at 80-85℃; The frying time is depended on carrot variety, frying temperature, and the vacuum degree. A specific way is by observing the bubbles on carrots when they all disappear, the vacuum frying ends. Finally, the oil content of carrot chips is about 35%~40%.
10. Deoiling
Equipment: carrot chips deoiling machine
The centrifugal deoiling machine is suitable to remove excess oil of chips. We have four models of deoiling machine, their output are, respectively, 8-10 kg/time, 15-20 kg/time, 25-30 kg/time, 35-40 kg/time. The appropriate model is chosen according to customer’s production line.
11. Packaging
Finally, the incomplete fragments will be rejected, and the qualified products are sorted by weighing and packaged in the vacuum or Nitrogen-filled packing bags.
Carrot Chips：A Nutritional Alternative to Potato Chips
1. Carrot chips making methods & appearance
Carrot chips are snack which has removed raw carrot’s discomfortable smell and retained most of the carrot’s nutrition. Carrot chips have the similar processing steps with potato chips processing such as the material cleaning & peeling, cutting, blanching, frying or drying until the chips become crispy. Then, both of them could be flavored or salted. However, carrot chips have an orange appearance which is different from yellow or white potato chips.
2. Carrot chips nutrition
Different from potato chips, fried or dried carrot chips are rich in Vitamin A: which could improve vision problems due to malnutrition, other nutrition such as beta-carotene and calcium have also been found in carrot chips. However, the fried carrot chips still contain high calorie. With the increase in health awareness, the dried carrot chips, which contain less fat than the fried one, are chosen as better alternatives to potato chips, as both of them have similar tastes and uses.
3. Carrot by-products’value
Carrot residues still have valued substances. For example, after processing, the carrot residues contain 4%–5% protein, 5%–6% minerals, 37%–48% total dietary fiber, and 71.6% total carbohydrates of raw material. What’s more, microelements like Na, K, Ca, Mn, Fe, Zn and beta-carotene have also been found in carrot pomace, all of the micronutrients could be extracted and used for making high-fibered biscuits, functional drinks, bread, and fortified wheat.
Carrot Chips Market
The processed carrot chips are nutritional food choice with appetizing taste. Its main types are divided into fried carrot chips and dried carrot chips, fried carrot chips are consumed as a substitute for potato chips and dried carrot chips could be used in cooking after the rehydration.
1. Fried carrot chips market
Our research has shown that people prefer healthier snack and they’d like to try a new taste. The carrot chips snack has nutrition and it is flavorful & crispy for kids who don’t like eating carrot vegetable.
In poverty-stricken areas of developing countries, people may choose deep-fried carrot chips to be their important food choice. Because in these areas, people are often lack of calories and vitamins, fried carrot chips could supply this nutrition and help them to combat vitamin deficiencies.
In the developed country like the UK, the market share of high-quality, handmade vegetable chips snack is still small and expected to enlarge. The research shows, 40% of the regular chips consumers are interested in buying sweet potato flakes, the rest of them would like to choose carrot chips, apple slices, and other fruit & vegetable mix chips.
2. Dried carrot chips market
Dried carrot chips have lower calories than the fried one, and they can be rehydrated & cooked as fresh carrots again. After six hours of rehydration in cold water and in 65℃ hot water, dried carrots chips separately have a rehydration ratio of 3.78:1 and 4.81:1. Because of its long storage time(basically six months) and lightweight for transportation, dried carrots have been sold in most of the supermarkets around the world. They may be used as a topping on soups or salad, or accompany with food such as hummus or dips.
3. Opportunities
Carrot chips’ raw material is easy to get(carrots are one of the ten most important vegetable crops in the global, world production of carrots and turnips in 2014 is 38.8 million MT), and with our fully automatic carrot chips production line, the expensive labor costs are saved, too.
4. Competition threats
Since more and more companies find business opportunities in instant vegetable slices which could catch up with the fast pace of urban life, competitions for providing better product experience and winning more market share become increasingly fierce among competitors. Therefore, it’s necessary for companies to classify market segments and add value pricing.
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