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RF MacDonald Co. offers sales, packaged systems design, service, installation, and parts for our customers!  

To request information or a quote, please use our Information/Quote request form.

Creating The Mechanical Wok
In an effort to automate the stir-fry Chinese food preparation process, Blentech Corp. and R.F. MacDonald Co. embarked on a dual mission.  Blentech engineers had recreated the manual stir-frying technique used for centuries in preparing Chinese dishes and incorporated this technique into an automated mechanical process.  One problem Blentech had was heating their Versa-Therm to a temperature that would be sufficient to brown the meat.  R.F. MacDonald Co. brought Fulton Thermal Corp. into the loop and between Blentech, Fulton Thermal Corp., and R.F. MacDonald Co., a hot thermal oil system was designed to provide high temperatures at low pressure to work in conjunction with Blentech’s mechanical stir-fry machine.  Blentech has now introduced a machine designed to mechanically stir-fry Chinese food on a very large scale and still retain the product quality as if stir-fried by hand.

The cooking of traditional Chinese food is very labor intensive.  Inside Chinese food plants, many cooks labor while stir-frying exotic dishes in small 5 to 30-lb batches.  These cooks labor hour after hour, batch after batch to produce the quantity of these dishes required for distribution.  This has made the preparation and distribution of Chinese dishes on a regional and national basis very difficult.  Usually commercial food companies prepare Chinese dishes for local markets only.

Several factors have prevented the mechanization of the wok cooking process.  They are as follows:

1. The extremely rapid cooking of Chinese stir-fry dishes requires quick, precise, manual stirring/tossing to evenly fry the product.
2. Stir-frying requires extremely high temperatures up to 500?F.  These temperatures are needed to sear the ingredients to produce the crisp, fresh texture enjoyed by Chinese food enthusiasts.
3. The stir-fried product must be rapidly cooled to maintain its crisp texture.  If not cooled more rapidly than it is cooked, it will become soggy.  This soggy texture is caused by the stewing of product in its own juices due to the internal heat of the batch.

The combination of the above process complications have made mechanizing stir-frying very impractical “until now.”

Blentech Corp. introduced the first “Mechanical Wok” proven to be as gentle and effective as the human touch in stir-frying fragile Chinese dishes.  Blentech has combined the patented features of the Versa-Therm with Fulton’s hot thermal oil heater to produce the ultimate “Mechanical Wok.”

Paratherm “NF” USDA Thermal Fluid is heated by a natural gas-fired or electrical heater and pumped through the jacket of the Versa-Therm.  Temperatures in excess of 500?F are possible with this heating system.  The Versa-Therm is equipped with high temperature “Ultem” plastic scrapers to mechanically scrape the heat exchange surfaces to control burn-on.  The patented scraper system is spring actuated to control rapid build-up of burn-on at these ultra-high temperatures.  The agitator system “tosses” the product toward the center of the Versa-Therm tub in the same way a person lightly mixes the crisp ingredients in a conventional wok.  The patented automatic reversing of the agitators mechanically redistributes the product for a few seconds once each minute to keep it frying uniformly.
 
When the product reaches the critical point of being cooked, the hot Paratherm Fluid is diverted past the Versa-Therm jacket through thermostatically controlled diverter valves.  At the same moment as the diverter valves bypass the hot oil, CO2  snowhorns mounted in the Versa-Therm cover, smother the crisp product with CO2  snow to instantaneously drop the product temperature to stop further cooking and preserve the product’s crisp quality.  Within seconds the discharge doors are opened and the product is augured out of the Vera-Therm for packaging.  One operator can stir-fry 300 lbs from loading to discharge in less than eight minutes.

Blentech Corp. is equipped to demonstrate this revolutionary system at its modern new Northern California factory.  In Blentech’s test laboratory they have set up a “Mechanical Wok” system with Fulton’s thermal heater to test the stir-fry cooking of your Chinese food dishes.

Whether your applications apply to areas such as Chinese food cooking or more conventional heating hot water and process steam requirements, R.F. MacDonald Co. stands ready to work with you to identify the best possible solution for your heating requirements.