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Meats

Meats are often one of the major components in a frozen meal. Several processing methods are used in preparing meats, such as marinating, cooking, and cutting or slicing.

Pickled meat

Meat may be preserved by dry curing or with a pickling solution. The ingredients used in curing and pickling are sodium nitrate, sodium nitrite, sodium chloride, sugar, and citric acid or vinegar.

Various methods are used: the meat may be mixed with dry ingredients; it may be soaked in pickling solution; pickling solution may be pumped or injected into the flesh; or a combination of these methods may be used.

Curing may be combined with smoking. Smoke acts as a dehydrating agent and coats the meat surfaces with various chemicals, including small amounts of formaldehyde.

Marinating

In order to tenderize the meat and develop desirable sensory attributes, a marinade is often helpful. Typical marinades contain salt, vinegar, lemon juice, spices, citric acid, and oil.

Tenderization of meats is particularly enhanced by marinades that contain proteolytic enzymes – i.e. enzymes that help to break down proteins. Meats are simply soaked in the marinade, or they are injected with marinade using special injection machines.

Cooking

Cooking of meats is necessary to eliminate all pathogens such as bacteria that produce harmful toxins. In a typical cooking process, the temperature at the centre of the meat is raised to 70° C (160°F) and held for at least two minutes.

Many meats are fried in immersion fryers. During frying, meats are cooked and desirable flavours created. Furthermore, the hot oil used in frying sears the surface of the meat, minimizing moisture loss during cooking. When meats are coated with breading material, frying is helpful in binding the batter. The oil retained in the breading layer enhances the aroma and texture of the fried foods.

Oven cooking is another method used to prepare main entrees in frozen prepared meals. Inside an oven, foods are heated by conduction, convection, or radiation. Certain ovens are designed to introduce steam during the heating cycle. In continuous-type ovens, the food moves on a mesh conveyor through different zones where the food may be subjected to different air velocities and steam flow in order to maintain the humidity at a desired level.

Batch-type ovens are ideally suited to cooking under vacuum. In vacuum cooking, meats are cooked at reduced pressure and temperature. In one vacuum technique, foods are cooked in their own juices, thus retaining their natural flavours and moisture.

Slicing and dicing

Cooked meats are more sensitive to physical handling than raw meats, because upon cooking the meat tissues become loosely connected with one another. Therefore, cooked meats are cooled to low temperatures, resulting in the stiffening of the muscle fibres, thus easing the cutting and slicing operations.

Meats are cut into cubes or dices by a dicing machine. A common industrial-scale dicer uses a knife blade attached to a revolving impeller. With each revolution of the impeller, the blade removes a slice from the large pieces of meat that are fed to the machine. The meat slices are cut into squares using cross-cut knives.