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Hey OP! I've got a rice-related work problem for ya. I'm a chef/food scientist/product developer at a medium-large Canadian food processor. We deal with a lot of cooked grains, dressings + sauces, and salad kits. We were recently contacted by a very large customer to provide samples for a 30+ day shelf life cooked sushi rice for use in poke bowls. It's a super high volume item, and I'm the primary developer on it (and also one of two people in this nationwide company that knows anything about food). We've been struggling pretty hard recently, if we get this business they will build me a fuckin statue. I've been doing a ton of bench work on this, and have figured out a seasoning blend that tastes real good, but can't seem to get the texture right. We've sent initial samples to the customer and they like the flavour, but agree that the grains aren't as separate as they should be. Our next round of samples is due next week, because of course it is, and since my company is a disaster I'm busy putting out fires constantly and can't sit on the bench and devote myself to actually testing things properly. Right now the recipe is as follows (quantities rounded): 88.5% 'Cooked' Calrose rice (9 min in a screw cooker. I know it's undercooked, the sous-vide process finishes the job) 3.5% Rice Vinegar @ 4% acetic acid 3.5% Sugar 2.5% Inulin Fibre (recommended to me by someone smart, willing to remove) 0.8% Table Salt 0.1% Miola Rice Conditioner (difficult to procure on our insane timeline and would like to cut it if necessary) 0.1% Yeast Extract Our usual process is as follows: Cook the rice in a screw cooker for a determined period of time (no wash step, sorry  )Drain and chill it to 4C. Put the random seasonings, veggies etc in and mix Pack in vacuum bags Sous vide the exact minimum amount of time to hit our F-value targets I've tried various permutations of the following things: -Removing the inulin fibre (actually makes the texture worse!) -Lowering the cook time (texture becomes bad in a different, crunchy way) -Increasing the cook time, removing the sous vide step, and packing the product in MAP seal bags (still goopy) -Using powdered acid to remove some liquid from the final product (still goopy) -Washing the rice (HUGE pain in the rear end for production, will skyrocket the final cost of the product, might not even be possible for the huge volume of product we'd have to produce, still goopy) -Using Calrose from different suppliers (still goopy) The customer already mentioned using thread favorite Koshihikari rice in their gold standard samples. Our procurement team can't get it in sufficient quantities in time for the theoretical product launch, so it's out of the picture. Plus it's way too expensive anyway. What do? Are there rice varietals/suppliers I should look out for? Is my recipe just hosed? Am I missing a panacea-like ingredient that will fix all of my problems and make me less of a bitter husk of a human being? Should I convince our operations department to blow a bunch of money on specialized equipment that will collect dust the second the customer finds a product that is 1 cent cheaper and delists our product? Should I just burn this place down and go full prepper and forsake modern life and live in the woods except I have a sick PC, internet connection, and tons of games? abuse culture. fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 21:51
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Doom Rooster posted:Not the OP, but what is your mixing procedure/equipment like at step 4? Wage slave takes a paddle to it until it looks mixed. We also have a dedicated mixing device but it's far too destructive to this product. It's moot right now since we're still doing everything by (my soft, supple, chef) hand in the test kitchen. Scaling it up in production will be a huge headache and thankfully not my problem yet. Vac seal pressure is absolutely negiotiable, we have a minimum setting that we use for rice items like this one to prevent clumping. Regardless, it's still gluey in a modified atmosphere (aka MAP) bag, which doesn't have any vacuum seal or sous vide step. I'm starting to wonder if the issue here is limited to the test kitchen, since we're cooking it real low tech (in a pot on the stove). In our screw cooker, it will basically take a 95C shower for X amount of time so it may not be sitting in a filthy bath of its own starch. Unfortunately the minimum quantity we can run through the screw cooker is 1000kg. I'm having trouble getting more than 5kg samples since all of our suppliers loving hate us, lol. And it's not like I can stop production from using the thing that makes us the most money to run some crazy experiments anyway. abuse culture. fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 16:36
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dino. posted:RE: Food manufacturer guy with gloopy rice. I don't have too much experience with cooking sushi rice, no. I'd love to be able to do it properly but I work for a food manufacturing company, not a kitchen. I'm trying to present a product that is 95% close to what would be produced on the factory floor. Sure, I could make up a 'Hollywood Sample' (actual term), but this is just gonna cause headaches down the line. This is a commodity product sold business to business; there are going to have to be sacrifices made in order to produce hundreds of thousands of kilos of this product every month. I'm trying to determine the way to produce the most reasonable facsimile of decent sushi-ish rice given the considerations of labour, cost effectiveness, and feasibility in a manufacturing environment. Suffice to say, a lot of the above steps are not possible, but some are! Because I'm working on bench-top scale at the moment, I'm using the pasta method. This is because we can't emulate how our screw cookers in the actual plant work - they're hockey rink sized pieces of equipment that take giant bins of rice and shuffle them through a 95C shower for X amount of time on a conveyor belt. But it is weirdly encouraging to hear that our lovely pasta method is not helping - that can be eliminated in production at least. Soaking is theoretically feasible but will cost a lot in labour, Keep in mind our current labour cost on this item is only weighing out the bin and shuffling it to and from the screw cooker, plus pressing one button. Adding an extra step there will more than double the labour component of the product, which is already the main cost driver. Is it worth it? That's for our clown customer to decide. I can provide samples of both. Usually they go for the cheaper product. The sous vide step is part of our standard process. ALSO a big part of what makes us competitive., it sure isn't our cost, lol. Shelf life is king for the type of customer we're working with here. We can get a product that's guaranteed food safe for 90+ days after the sous vide step. Without the sous vide step, even with preservatives and funky atmosphere technologies you're lucky to get 20. It's not STRICTLY necessary since we can also freeze the item! But it's way more cost, and worse, more labour for both us and our customer. Yes, even thawing out a bag of product is too difficult for a lot of our customers. This is a deal breaker so often! I'd really like to keep our sous vide step and work around it. I can provide our customer with both samples but basically once you get past 3 different samples you overload their puny brains. dino. posted:4. WTF is inulin fiber doing there? It forms a gel. Have you ever dissolved inulin fibre in water? It becomes slimy. That's gonna make the problem WORSE not better. The inulin fibre is actually doing some good in our sous vide recipes. It traps excess moisture (purge from the rice, water from the vinegar, excess wetness because we do a poo poo job draining it). Without it, the rice becomes rice soup after the sous vide process. Usually we would use modified corn starch or xanthan gum for this kind of scenario (happens a lot when sous viding chicken for example) but both of them do much, much worse things to our calrose rice than inulin does. dino. posted:5. What is the rice conditioner doing in there? Dramatically improves texture (not stickiness!) on the rice when included before sous vide step. It's a collection of enzymes that help the rice absorb water better. Works in concert with inulin fibre to keep the bag as dry as possible inside. dino. posted:6. What is the yeast extract doing in there? Sushi rice is salt, sugar, vinegar, rice. That's it. I don't know what the rest of that stuff is doing there. If it's extending the shelf life, that's fine. It's MSG but without being MSG basically. Our customers and especially end users basically expect all asian food to taste like MSG. Even when it doesn't belong. I don't like it, but I do what I have to do to make a product that sells. Our target audience is Joe Bumblefuck who just tried miso soup for the first time. dino. posted:Most of all, I don't know how they expect you to do a full rear end research and development on a timeline especially when your company doesn't specialize in making rice. The guys that I buy my IQF (individual quick frozen) rice from are the only ones who do it in their entire region, and they supply to everyone who orders from them. I don't mean in their state. I mean in their entire freaking region. As in, when we checked with other IQF manufacturers in other countries, they were like "Yeah, we do veg, not rice. For rice, you have to call this guy." Rice cooking in huge quantities is hard, and it's extremely easy to waste a ton of product and make a mess. We do specialize in rice! We sell millions and millions of kilos of fully cooked rice a year. There's a very, very good chance that most of this thread has eaten our (my!!!! I've designed all our best sellers!!!!!!) products several times. Our customer is actually one of our better ones, we do a bunch of business with them already. They are a household name, and are very very successful and beloved even by the jaded 40 year olds on this forum. That said... The customer is a loving idiot, like basically every single person who works in this industry is. The pay sucks rear end, most of the 'business' types may not have even ever eaten food before, and every bit of passion is slowly sucked out of the good ones as they're dragged down into mediocrity. All of those things you mentioned happen repeatedly, except for the QC thing. There is no actual QC on the customer's end. We do work in JIT, which is loving amazing since we somehow haven't learned our lesson from COVID's continuing supply headaches! I guarantee you the person who asked me to use Koshihikari (aka the buyer) googled 'best sushi rice' and that's the extent of his knowledge on the subject. Our timelines are ridiculous. For developing new products, pre scale-up, we usually get less than two weeks. Our NPD process is one of our sales people sends an email saying 'hey abuse culture i ned sushi rice march 13. pls ma;ke' with even worse typos and this is somehow the person I'm supposed to take orders from. It's insane and I want to personally slap every single sales person and especially executive in my company. But I can't fix that. Aside from getting another job (yes please!) all I can do is try to make a reasonable quality facsimile of what some toad-man in middle America thinks is Sushi rice so he can impulse buy it since he doesn't have time to cook before the game's on, or the kids have to go to Hot Chip and Lie Practice, etc. abuse culture. fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 21:10
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I'll try to post some pics when I go back in on Monday. Might as well complete the saga. They're going to be what I send. If we get the business, great, but we have like a 10% success rate (actually very, very good) on new product approvals so I'm fine if it misses what they want.
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Mar 9, 2024 21:12
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