Tools that Create

Josep Lagares, whose father founded Metalquimia, explains that the current system of curing and drying meat for products such as chorizo and salami hasn't changed significantly since the time of the Romans. The ground meat is salted and infused with spices. It ferments for a short time to fuse the mass together. Then the meat hangs and slowly dries before the final product is ready to be sold.

Today, though, many people around the world buy meat pre-sliced, instead of whole. “So why don't we turn the process around? Why don't we slice it first and then dry it?” continues Lagares. “If you pre-slice the produce, you have a much smaller surface to dry.”

Metalquimia partnered with IRTA and a local meat processor. For three years, the company has been perfecting the machinery to optimize the taste, safety, and stability of the system. “Unless you're an expert, a professional in the field, the taste is almost indistinguishable [from the standard],” he says.

The company has a small industrial machine at the factory and is putting the finishing touches on a large-scale machine that will be tested at the nearby meat producer. Once Metalquimia is fully satisfied with the results of scaling up the system, it will market the machine to its international customers, many of whom are already clamoring to buy one.

Lagares says the company's creativity began with his father, who invented machines that “simply didn't exist before.” For instance, he developed a machine that would inject the meat with brine, allowing for even distribution and curing. Encouraging this type of innovation has become a systematic part of company culture.

Rather than taking advantage of the trend toward increasingly fast food, NC Hyperbaric profits from the growing interest in natural, minimally processed foods. A spinoff of Nicolás Correa, the company began operations in 2000, industrializing a heat-free pasteurization method.

“Traditionally, foods were processed by thermal methods to make them safer for longer,” says technical sales manager Francisco Purroy. “But the heat has an impact on the quality of the foods and the integrity of the ingredients.”

The new technique involves using extraordinarily high levels of water pressure to disrupt the normal functioning of bacterial cells. This process has been known since the late 1800s, but the technology has not been available to implement it on an industrial scale. In NC Hyperbaric's machine, food in well-sealed flexible packaging is loaded into a cylinder. Then the chamber fills with water. After the chamber has been filled, more water is pumped in, increasing the pressure. “It's like taking the final packaging and putting it very deep in the ocean—even deeper than the pressure you could find in nature,” says Purroy. This pressure destroys molecular bonds in microorganisms but not the nutrients in food or the molecules that confer its distinctive flavor. The final product retains more of the fresh taste and the original nutrients than food treated with heat, Purroy says.

Improvements in steel and other materials have made it possible to scale this process up from the laboratory. One key part of the design involves tightly wrapping miles of wire around the chamber to compress the steel. Under high pressure the precompressed steel is actually in a relatively relaxed phase, which helps the vessel last longer. The company patented its designs and continues to dedicate 10 percent of its turnover to research each year. So far, only two companies are marketing this type of technology industrially, with NC Hyperbaric leading the way.

Many customers have been able to use the technology for purposes other than simple pasteurization. Seafood companies in Mississippi and Japan use the pressure to pop open bivalves such as oysters and mussels without the arduous manual labor usually required. Another seafood application involves lobsters: because their meat typically cannot be extracted without cooking, chefs who want to use lobster usually buy the meat already cooked or cook it themselves, so that it's been cooked twice by the time the dish is served. The new process makes it possible to detach the raw meat from the exoskeleton. The first companies began using this pressure machinery to extract raw lobster meat in 2005, and the product is already popular with chefs.