Many cooking systems have been and are in use to produce pellet
snacks from unprocessed fl ours and starches but the most
internationally known and used is the cooking extrusion system.
3D Snacks Extruders are used to shape the pellets after cooking, to
make die cut products or to extrude sheets or ribbons to be shaped
and cut at distance from the die. When the raw materials are
already pre-cooked, like for instance with potato based products,
there is no need for the cooking step: this pellet production
process is referred to as cold extrusion.
All raw materials requiring cooking are processed in the first
extrusion-cooking step, followed by the shaping step of the cooked
mass, which can be either the above-mentioned cold extrusion or any
other system capable of giving a correct shape to the hot dough
before the drying.