Energy Consumption Estimation during Oven Cooking of Food

Abstract

Oven cooking of food is a traditional and widely used technology, both at a household and industrial level, which confers to foods unique organoleptic properties, which can not be accomplished using other available technologies. At the same time, it is a highly energetic intensive process, due to the fact that most foods have a high level of water content, which is partially evaporated during roasting. Any attempts to minimize energy consumption of the process must be done carefully, since the quality of the product should not be negatively affected and, on several occasions, there are security and legislative standards to comply. In this chapter the energy consumption during roasting of beef semitendinosus muscle samples has been estimated, using an electric oven. The samples were cooked at oven temperature between 172 and 223 °C until they reach a core temperature of 72 °C. A simple procedure to determine the effective power of the oven from experimental measurements is proposed, which can be applied to other situations and processes. Then, from the experimental results, energy consumption of the oven between 4 to 6.3 MJ/kg of raw sample was found, while energy consumption of sample varies between 484 to 780 kJ/kg of raw sample. So, the ratio of sample energy consumption to oven energy consumption, provide a simple estimation of the energy efficiency of the process, which was found to be between 7.7 to 18.3%. Furthermore, a mathematical model of the beef roasting process has been used to estimate the actual energy consumption of the samples, which fit well with the experimental results.