Energy and baking performance of alternative cooking technologies aiming to reduce CO2 emissions
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Abstract
Reducing energy consumption, cooking time and pollutant emissions in the restaurant industry has great economic and sustainability potential. In pizza cooking, the use of microwaves, superheated steam, infrared and magnetic induction, and some of their combinations was studied in order to reduce the cooking time. To guarantee the viability of the resulting product, the subjective properties of the cooked pizzas were analyzed objectively under instrumental techniques and grouped into cooking and physical quality characteristics. The pizzas produced by each technology were compared to a baseline pizza baked by an oven with hot air impingements widely used in restaurants. Energy consumption and CO2 emissions were estimated for each of the selected cooking methods in order to evaluate the environmental impact of the cooking time reduction. It was found that overall cooking time for the pizza was reduced by 50% when using IR in the last stage of the process. This resulted in a decrease of 27% in energy consumption and of 27.1% in CO2 emissions while retaining the desired quality properties of the pizza.