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The History of cook-chill The concept of food preservation, i.e. the time buffer, in catering arose primarily through the need to produce quality food products in advance of need in a highly reproducible way and the necessity of providing maximal assurance of product safety. Thus food manufacturing, the maxims and precepts of large scale, systematized food production grew up from infancy in the use of simple dehydrated products (dried fruits and meats) and cured foods (salted meats and fish) to the use of technologies in the bottling and then the canning industries. Subsequently, with the introduction of reliable refrigeration systems, the frozen cooked food sector began to grow. The usefulness of cooked, frozen foods was recognized in the catering industry in the 1960's and earlier but some began production of such foods themselves. With the realization that chilled foods also resisted corruption by micro-organisms (albeit for a far shorter time than frozen foods) and did not lead to often undesirable effects of freezing on texture, flavor and even color, this move was soon followed by the equally rapid growth of the use of cooked, chilled food products in catering. In the early 1960's and 1970's, this new method was often taken up and implemented in an ad hoc way. In more recent times however, with the experiences of early users (and the food manufacturing industry) and the potential hazards associated with the method being more widely publicized, caterers have begun to adopt a far more systematic and rational approach in cook-chill catering. History
of cook-chill
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