You might be wondering – what exactly is a Rheon machine?
The basic concept of Rheon machines are to essentially combine any two materials – one as an outside casing and the second as a filling.
Rheon products are found in a number of different foods such as meat and poultry, snack and health foods, seafoods, confectionery, and also products popular at the moment like Arancini, filled fish cakes, and fruit bars.
The machine extrudes the two materials as a continuous extrusion and a shutter device, not unlike a camera iris, and cuts and seals the extrusion to the desired weights and/or lengths.
Variations on these basic machine functions are:
- The ability to deliberately leave the top of a ball product open by using a special shutter, allowing the filling to be seen. This was developed primarily for producing individual portion pizzas but has other applications as well.
- The ability to use different shaped ring and nozzle sets that can be square, triangular or almost any shape including open topped, where the filling is a layer on the second material (casing) rather than being enclosed by it.
- The ability to make the filling into pictures or mosaics. This is primarily used for biscuits where teddy bears or smiley faces can be produced with two different coloured (and flavoured) biscuit doughs.
- The ability to add a second filling into the centre. The second filling (or third material) must be of a paste or thick liquid type nature. An example may be to produce round potato balls with a meat filling, and a dash of tomato sauce in the centre of the meat.
- The ability to place a solid object inside the case material, with or without a filling around it. This could be a sweet pastry, with chocolate filling and a strawberry in the centre. It may be an olive in the centre of a ball of meat.
Visit Symetec at Stand J42 on Level 4 at foodpro or head to www.symetec.com to find out more.