The Tastefull adventure of "de bitterbal" (crunshy snack)
🔥The Flavorful Adventure of the Bitterball: A Look Behind the Scenes!
Bitterballs are our national snack. What tricks are used in the industry and why?
The Start: The Magic of the Roux 🚀🚦🔥
To make a beautiful roux, the wheat flour is first fried in vegetable oil or butter.
The Golden Ragout: Secrets of the Industry 🌾🌪️🔥
Once the Roux is beautifully warm, smooth, and glossy, you start adding water. A concentrated stock or flavoring is often added to the water for taste. Now it is a Ragout. First, a binding agent is added to this ragout to allow it to be shaped after cooling. In the kitchen, this binding agent consists only of gelatin, but in the industry, something is added to it.
The Secret Binding Agent 🎩✨
These additional binding systems are made from modified fibers (E460-E469) and ensure two things. First, that the water in the ragout remains evenly distributed in the freezer. And second, that the ragout thickens slightly when heated and retains moisture better. This prevents the ragout from running out of its casing in the fryer or exploding. 💥
FBI has also developed a Vegan binding system that no longer requires beef gelatin. This revolutionary Vegan binding block produces a fantastically shiny, smooth ragout that you will lick your fingers clean for.
Taste Explosions: Herbs, Vegetables, and Meat 🥩🍅 🪴
Next, the herbs, vegetables, and cooked meat can be added. Every recipe can be different, and here too, the touch and experience of the chef/product developer play a major role. Salt: The Flavor Enhancer 🧂
The SALT content is very important.
The salt content of own-brand snacks (AH, Lidl, etc.) is subject to guidelines (no more than 1.18 grams of salt per 100g). Brand manufacturers, such as Mora, often did not adhere to these, and you could see that the salt content there could be significantly higher. In recent years, however, you have seen an improvement in this area. The salt content in snack bars and restaurants is often considerably higher because no agreements have been made there.
The perfect crust: Batter and Breadcrumbs 🍞🟠 💦
Once the ragout is thoroughly cooked, it is filled into containers that go into the refrigerator to firm up. When the ragout is cold enough, it goes into the forming machine, which makes nice round balls. These balls then pass through a liquid adhesive batter, then through a fine breadcrumb, batter again, and a coarse breadcrumb. At home, you use liquid egg for the batter, but in the industry, this is a powder/water mixture of flour/starch, vegetable protein, thickener, and sugar (for the beautiful brown color and crispness). This coating needs to be sturdy enough. Deep-fried products often have 3 to 4 layers. Oven products contain an extra layer of batter and breading because they are pre-fried in the factory.
Into the freezer they go, and start packaging!
The Finale: Dig in!
The perfect bitterballen, ready to enchant your taste buds. 🪄
Do you have questions after this tasty account? I'd be happy to answer them 🤓🔍
#BibberbalSecrets #FoodIndustry #TastefulAdventure #SnackMagic🔥
