Vacuum cooling mushrooms: the quickest pre-cooling technique
The faster mushrooms are cooled after harvesting, the lower the reject percentage. With conventional cooling, the perfect storage temperature of 2 – 4 C is being reached after 8 – 10 hours. With vacuum cooling, this process can be shortened to 15 – 30 minutes. Even when they are packed in crates and put on pallets. WeberCooling develops vacuum cooling systems
Weber Vacuum Cooling
Mushrooms Vacuum cooling is a process which cools the produce by evaporating a fraction of the moisture from the produce, by reducing the pressure inside the vacuum room. At very low pressure, water wants to evaporate (“boil”) spontaneously at room temperature or lower. The evaporation process requires a lot of energy, and takes this energy from the produce, thus lowering the temperature of the produce. The effect is a very fast and very uniform cooling of the produce. And the process is very easy to control, and extremely energy efficient.
Product suitable for vacuum cooling need an open structure and a lot of surface as evaporation only takes place at the surface. Mushrooms are, like leafy vegetables and flowers, perfectly suited for vacuum cooling. Studies have shown that vacuum cooled mushrooms are significantly better with regard to colour (enzymic browning) than conventionally cooled.
Weber Vacuum Group is leading producer of vacuum cooling machines. They have supplied many systems during previous years and it is their core (and only!) focus.
