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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, misspoke there. Not recirculators but retherm baths.

If you remember Taco Bells from the 1970s, the beef was cooked in large open vats by store employees. Now it's cooked in a central kitchen and shipped refrigerated to stores where it's held at serving temperature in a water bath.

Changing to this technique eliminated a huge amount of employee accidents (burns, slips) and boosted their health inspection ratings, not to mention product consistency.

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And profits? Probably forget the biggest reason why they did it.

Hopefully better product results in greater profit, yes.

I doubt it would amount to a better product - a safer product perhaps, sure. If you think pre-cooked and frozen would make a better product than fresh and freshly cooked.. then we have different ideas of what better means.

Par-cooking (preparing food ahead of time, storing it, then reheating it) is a common cooking technique and if done properly does not change the composition or quality of the food one bit.

These are not sodium and preservative-laden frozen meals we are talking about. These are products made in large commercial quantities for quick preparation.

I do indulge in Taco Bell from time to time and, let me tell you, I'd rather have the food prepared by a quality-controlled system than the stoned kid in the back that may or may have not remembered to add the seasoning when it was time.

Don't disagree regarding food preparation, though I've tasted a meal that's pre-cooked chicken vs. fresh chicken, and quite the difference exists in many characteristics of the chicken. It was a smaller place, and perhaps their methods weren't the best - though I'm not sure how you prevent the effects of frozen water damaging the chicken and making it taste different, texture wise too..

Read up on vacuum sealing. That's a key step in this kind of food preparation. A lot of times the par-cooked food doesn't go to frozen, or it's not frozen for long, so freezer burn is not a factor.

It's Taco Bell fast food. Food quality will be universally better if it doesn't rely on the local staff of minimum wage earning kids. Fresh and freshly cooked? You've clearly never eaten at a Taco Bell throughout the decades. Their prep and presentation today is much, much better than say 30 years ago.

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