Shierly Chandra: Food Processing Part II (Industrial Scale)

Trick Or Treat???

Happy Halloween, guys!!! How do you feeling today? Do you know what to wear for tonight? I got some ideas for you! How about dressing like a zombie nurse? Or an old Chinese vampire? Or a pirate? Or a witch? It doesn't matter what you wear, let's just get tricky tonight!! Anyway, still wondering what’s gonna be my next post? Well, not to waste anymore time, let’s get started!

Food Processing in industrial scale always consist of many steps. Even the simplest, like processing pickle, we need to do not less than three steps, which are wash, cut and ferment.

Cassava can be harvested about 12-14 months after planting. If we harvest too soon or too late, the starch content is not fit for the production (starch content is not the highest). To process tapioca flour from raw cassava, first we need to peel the cassava. While peeling, the cassava also washed. Then the skin-less cassava being cut and rasped and we have the cassava porridge. After that, the porridge moved to the extractor. The extractor applies centrifugal force to separate the liquid from its pulp. The liquid contains water and tapioca. The liquid then moved to the separator. The separator also applies centrifugal force so in this process also called the second process of centrifugal. The difference between the extractor and separator is that the nozzle is being used in the separator. The nozzle helps in controlling the direction of a fluid flow (especially to increase or decrease the velocity). In this process, we will separate the tapioca with lower density from high protein water. The tapioca will be moved to the next process while the high protein water will be used again in the extractor. The tapioca will be further filtered to obtain the higher density level. After that, we dry the starch in the oven until the water is all evaporated and the tapioca flour is ready to be used.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5032e/x5032E0D.GIF

milk = white juice from certain plant (in this case, from cassava root)

To produce one kilogram of tapioca flour, we will need ± 5 kilograms of raw cassava. In large factory, they could produce up to 80 tons of tapioca flour in one day which means they will need ± 400 tons raw cassava. In 1 hectare field, we could only harvest 10 tons of cassava. To harvest 400 tons of cassava, we’ll need ± 40 hectare of cassava fields in one day. So, we could conclude that large factory will need to harvest 40 hectare cassava fields in order to produce tapioca flour per day.

That’s only one of the many kinds of food processing in industrial scale. It’s amazing, right, how people can manage food processes in just one single day so that consumers will never run out of foods and they still could fulfill their needs of food.

So this is the ending of this session, I will add some flowcharts about food processing products below. I hope you like it. Adios! :D