Shelf life of Poppy seed pie fill and walnut fill

Im working in food industry, producing mainly thermostable pie fills, for filling bakery products (donuts etc).

Lately we started production of poppy seed and walnut fill.
Its a good product and only problem i have is shelf life.

Our production is older, not aseptic (open cooking vessel).
Does anyone have expirience with poppy seed/walnut, and preservatives which can help?
Im using sorbic acid atm...

Thank you in advance,


Bojan

Im working in food industry, producing mainly thermostable pie fills, for filling bakery products (donuts etc).

Lately we started production of poppy seed and walnut fill.
Its a good product and only problem i have is shelf life.

Our production is older, not aseptic (open cooking vessel).
Does anyone have expirience with poppy seed/walnut, and preservatives which can help?
Im using sorbic acid atm...

Thank you in advance,


Bojan

A BUMP for Bojan.

I will elaborate little further.

pH= 6,0
dry matter= around 70 Brix


I keep cooking temp. bellow pasteurisation temp. - segregation of oil.
Maybe ill just heat up process and not worry about oil?

Dear Bojan,

This looks like a very specialised (and delicious) product area. My own basic experience here is approx. zero but I think you may hv to clarify yr problem slightly to get any reaction. I guess yr product falls into this general area –

http://spo-nsk.com/1206343161.php

I noticed some (maybe irrelevant )comments on typical "bakery" shelf-life problems here –

prolonging_bakery_product_life_.htm   65.09KB   80 downloads
(original link seems gone)

I’m sure your problem was shelf-life too short but how much too short / reason / target etc ??

Rgds / Charles.C

added - yr last comment looks conceptually pretty logical to me if you can do it easily without negative side-effects.

Dear Charles,

thank you for some guidance (and links), i really appreciate the effort :)
I will try some suggestions founded on those web sites.

I will keep you informed.



Bojan

Hello!

Here are some links that might be useful to you:

Bakery Products: Science and Technology

Manufacturing of Bread and Bakery Products

Bakery Technology and Engineering

Technology of breadmaking

Use of ethanol in food preservation

Shelf-Life Evaluation of Foods

Cheers!

SaRaRa thank you :)
Now, to reading!



Bojan

I keep cooking temp. bellow pasteurisation temp. - segregation of oil.
Maybe ill just heat up process and not worry about oil?

Hi Bojan,

If you are open to modified starches, I believe companies like National Starch and TIC Gum can recommend suitable emulsifiers/stabilizers to prevent that oil separation of your's.

BTW, how long a shelf life are you looking at? One to two weeks? One month? Maybe placing a pack of oxygen scavenger and ethanol emitters might help?

added - Charles, the original article is still there. Here's the link.

FoodProductDesign

Sorry no idea but I ate some rather lovely poppy seed filled pastries in the Czech Republic and Hungary in my time and I can certainly say they are products worth the hassle! They were very tasty!

I have no pastry filling experience but I do have sauce experience. Some we found were just difficult. Some things we did to improve the stability included using starches as suggested earlier, making a traditional roux with butter / cornflour as a base / thickener and stabiliser but also having the ingredients at the right temperature. Something we did to improve micro shelf life on one product was by precooking one of the ingredients. Is it worth getting them pre heat treated?

Method of cooling was also key with sauces. The highest fat, richest sauce seemed to cope so much better if it was capkolded rather than tray cooled or cooled quickly through chilled pipes. It may be a way of bringing back the filling from its split state and tends to have better shelf life as it's anaerobic (as long as you can be sure there's no C. botulinum risks of course.)

Hongyun,



I do work with some National Starches for our fruit fillings, and yes, implementing them sounds like good idea.

Im trying to ger 3-4 months of shelf life.

Reading through some articles linked by SaRaRa, i found option wih ethanol, and im trying it this week.





GMO,

Preheating some ingredients sounds interesting.



Bottom line is, my equipment is old and product is sensitivie.

But hey, where is a chalange in working on hi tech machinery, producing simple products



Thank you all.