Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008 - (Page 20)

Albuquerque Tortilla Co. produces a wide variety of signature tortillas ranging from 6-in. ﬂour gorditas and 8-in. home-style products to 9-in. burrito-sized ones to 10- and 12-in. wraps. The company also produces white, yellow and blue corn tortillas, as well as unfried tortilla chips that are cooked up fresh at foodservice establishments. (Photos by Vito Palmisano) Continued from page 19 facturers, the hopper on each divider is outﬁtted with a metal lid that opens when the mixer bowl is elevated and gets ready to dump dough into the system. “When I ﬁrst started, I told them I wanted a cover on it for food safety reasons and product quality,” Pete explains. “They had never heard of anyone asking for that before. I told them if the dough gets exposed to air and ﬂows over, the crust cannot be rehydrated and we have to toss it away.” After dividing and rounding, the dough balls travel through an intermediate proofer for 15 minutes, which allows the pieces to relax and become more elastic. The dough balls then are hot pressed and baked in a 20-ft., three-pass oven for about two minutes. Albuquerque Tortilla Co. bakes them longer because its New Mexican-style ﬂour tortillas are about 30% thicker than conventional ones and are branded with distinctive toast marks that give the products their unique character. As they exit the oven, the tortillas then spend about 2.5 minutes in a refrigerated cooler where the circulating air set at 45°F helps eliminate sticking during packaging. The products subsequently head into a counter-stacker to a bagger, twist tyer, code date system and metal detector before they’re manually placed in bread baskets. Although many bakeries and tortilla producers ship their products in baskets, Albuquerque Tortilla Co. takes an extra step and places the packaged tortilla in cardboard cases, even for locally delivered items. Eight family packs, for instance, ﬁts into each case. “It costs more,” Pete says, “but we don’t have to worry about baskets being broken or stolen.” After casepacking, the products are palletized and automatically shrinkwrapped before heading to the shipping department. “Everything we produce today goes out tonight and is in stores tomorrow,” Pete says. A separate room houses corn tortilla and uncut tortilla chip production. Albuquerque Tortilla Co. cooks its own corn, which then is stone ground and mixed in 150-lb. batches in a horizontal mixer. The company is setting up a new system with two, 400-gallon steam cookers, which will provide continuous corn production, 24 hours a day, Pete says. Production is done on two double and two quad lines. The double lines produce 1,250 dozen corn tortillas an hour while the quads, or four-row lines, make 2,500 dozen an hour. The most popular seller is the 90-count, 6-in. corn tortilla followed by a 36-count package. The process is straightforward, with the masa being hot pressed before the tortillas are baked in a three-pass oven followed by cooling and packaging. For unfried tortilla chips, Albuquerque Tortilla Co. uses a ﬁrmer, more porous tortilla that lets the steam out to produce crispier, restaurant chips when they’re fried in restaurant kitchens like French fries and served hot to customers with a side of salsa. Stacks of unpackaged corn tortillas are wheeled from the corn tortilla production department into an adjacent room where a single operator places a stack of around 100 tortillas under a four-chip cutter and presses down to slice them. The triangular pieces tumble into a separator drum before they travel down a short conveyor and are dumped into a plastic lined box. Working on Efﬁciencies With the new USDA-inspected plant online, Albuquerque Tortilla Co. now is focusing on boosting sales of its frozen prepared foods. Currently, the products are sold throughout the Southwest, but it has some shotgun distribution as far away as Woodbury, N.Y. For the near future, Chris notes, new product development remains a priority for fueling sales. The new food processing plant, he adds, was designed with versatility in mind. “In foodservice, we will be able to manufacture our recipes for broad line distribution as well as for custom recipe requests,” he says. “We are not limited to manufacturing only Hispanic foods, but that will remain our main focus.” From a production standpoint, he notes, the continued emphasis is on enhancing 20 Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - DECEMBER 2008 www.snackandbakery.com http://www.snackandbakery.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008

Snack Food &�Wholesale Bakery - December 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Now, That’s Haute! Bigger ‘n’ Better But Is It Art? New Products Branching Out Engineering Management Fits to a T Racing to the Finish The Final Word

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008

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