16 Secondary chilling of meat and meat products Meat is chilled immediately after slaughter. Most of the subsequent opera- tions in the cold chain are designed to maintain the temperature of the meat Cooking is a very common operation in the production of many meat products and operators appreciate the importance of rapidly cooling the cooked product. However, any handling such as cutting, mixing or tumbling will add heat to the meat and increase its temperature. A secondary cooling operation is always required with chilled meat and meat products to reduce their temperature to approaching 0C and maintain their storage life The aim of any cooking process for meat/meat produce is to ensure the destruction of vegetative stages of any pathogenic microorganisms. However, there is always the possibility that the cooking process will not kill some microorganisms that produce spores or that the food can become recontaminated. Therefore, microbiologists recommend that the tempera ture of the meat should be rapidly reduced, especially from approximately 60 and 5C, to prevent multiplication of existing or contaminating bacte ria. Rapid cooling is also desirable with cooked products to maintain quality by eliminating the overcooking that occurs during slow cooling There are specific cooling recommendations for cook-chill and cook-freeze catering systems. However, even with thin products these are difficult to achieve without surface freezing. Cooling large hams and other cooked meat joints is inherently a much slower process and studies have shown that companies often have very poor cooling systems. The methods available to cool meat joints, pies and other cooked prod ucts have been described in detail by James(1990a). A review of the use of vacuum cooling in the food industry has been published by McDonald and Sun(2000)16 Secondary chilling of meat and meat products Meat is chilled immediately after slaughter. Most of the subsequent opera￾tions in the cold chain are designed to maintain the temperature of the meat. Cooking is a very common operation in the production of many meat products and operators appreciate the importance of rapidly cooling the cooked product. However, any handling such as cutting, mixing or tumbling will add heat to the meat and increase its temperature. A secondary cooling operation is always required with chilled meat and meat products to reduce their temperature to approaching 0 °C and maintain their storage life. The aim of any cooking process for meat/meat produce is to ensure the destruction of vegetative stages of any pathogenic microorganisms. However, there is always the possibility that the cooking process will not kill some microorganisms that produce spores or that the food can become recontaminated. Therefore, microbiologists recommend that the tempera￾ture of the meat should be rapidly reduced, especially from approximately 60 and 5 °C, to prevent multiplication of existing or contaminating bacte￾ria. Rapid cooling is also desirable with cooked products to maintain quality by eliminating the overcooking that occurs during slow cooling. There are specific cooling recommendations for cook–chill and cook–freeze catering systems. However, even with thin products these are difficult to achieve without surface freezing. Cooling large hams and other cooked meat joints is inherently a much slower process and studies have shown that companies often have very poor cooling systems. The methods available to cool meat joints, pies and other cooked prod￾ucts have been described in detail by James (1990a). A review of the use of vacuum cooling in the food industry has been published by McDonald and Sun (2000)