Toppings & Crumbles For Ready Meals
Toppings and crumbles are used in a wide variety of sweet and savoury products, particularly ready meals and recipe dishes. They are a versatile range of ingredients that have 2 primary functions:
Texture enhancement
Toppings impart a light crispy texture, which is complimentary to the substrate (e.g. meat in sauce, fillet of fish) on which the topping is sprinkled.
Visual enhancement
Toppings up lift appearance and increase the appeal of the substrate, which, on its own, can look boring and unappetising.
Toppings are specially formulated breadcrumbs that are enriched in vegetable oil. The crumb has a natural variation of size, shape and colour which gives it a unique appearance. Particle size, shape, colour, texture and oil content can be adjusted to suit all applications. The products perform consistently well with all methods of cooking and are especially suitable for microwave applications.
Chaucer Food's toppings can be mixed with other ingredients e.g. cheese, to produce the ideal complete topping for recipe dishes and ready meals and a host of other modern convenience foods.
What applications?
Toppings can be used to enhance products such as:
Meat, fish, and poultry-based ready meals (in sauce)
Vegetable-based ready meals (in sauce)
Pasta dishes (e.g. tuna bakes, pasta bakes)
Sweet crumbles (e.g. apple crumbles)
Chilled or frozen fillets/escallops
Fish toppings
What functionality?
Chaucer Food's toppings are based on specially formulated breads, which are enriched in vegetable oil and ground to a specific particle size profile, which give them their functional characteristics.
For more information on the functionality of toppings click here.
What product types?
The Chaucer Food's product range is based on a core number of oiled crumbs with varying oil contents and sieving specifications.
Added to this, the range contains a wide number of flavoured toppings where the oiled crumbs are mixed with other sweet or savoury ingredients to provide a complete topping mix.
New flavours and varieties can be formulated to specific customer requirement (subject to minimum order requirements).
For more information on the toppings product range click here.
What packaging?
Toppings are typically packed in 20kg cardboard boxes.
What shelf life?
Toppings have a typical shelf life of 12 months under normal storage conditions avoiding heat and direct sunlight.
What quality assurance?
Chaucer Food's quality assurance team take pride in ensuring all products are delivered to customers in optimum condition.
All production batches are assessed by a daily taste panel against organoleptic standards for taste texture and product appearance.
All products are tested to ensure conformance to microbiological standards.
All deliveries of oil are tested for conformance to specification for peroxide values and lauric acid levels (important indicators of oil quality and shelf life).
Chaucer Food's UK manufacturing site is BRC (Higher) and ISO 9001 2000 accredited.
Why Chaucer?
Track record of creativity, novelty and innovation in
developing exciting new ingredients for convenience foods.
Comprehensive and flexible product range to suit numerous
end product applications.
Commitment to quality.
Do you need further information?
Click here if you have specific requirements or wish to receive samples and/or specifications of Chaucer Food's Products.