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Banana snack industry goes stale

Not so long ago, the Central Java town of Majenang was famous for being the home of sale pisang, a unique snack made with bananas, but recently the market changed and the local snack industry faded to a fraction of its former success. Majenang, one of 23 districts in Cilacap regency in the far west of the province - bordering with Banjar and Ciamis regencies in West Java - has about 30 small factories producing the snack. Before the 1998 economic crisis, there were around 100 such producers, leading Cilacap administration to come up with the idea of making the snack the icon of Majenang. But with the crisis, the plan hit snags and many cottage industries were forced out of business. More than a decade later, the situation has yet to improve. "Before the crisis I could sell 2 or 3 tons of fried banana sweets to Jakarta. But things are difficult now," Yayat, a 61-year-old sale pisang business owner, told The Jakarta Post in Majenang. Today, Yayat produces only about 200 kilograms of sale pisang a month, and 99 percent of this is sold in Majenang. The snacks are sold in 250-gram packages, each costing around Rp 25,000 (US$2). Another snack producer, Juremi, said that before the crisis she could send 2 tons of sale pisang to Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya each month. "Now we only sell sale pisang for the local market," the 60-year-old said. Juremi said most of the snack producers were struggling to survive. "What's important is that business survives. If there are buyers in the city, that's enough. Sometimes we get an order from outside the city, but this is unreliable," she said. "Once, a distributor from outside the city wanted to place an order, but the price he offered was too low to cover our production costs. Rather than suffering losses, we preferred not to take it." Making sale pisang does not take long. Ripe bananas are cut into slices and dried in the sun. "If the sun is bright, the bananas will dry out in two days. But in a rainy season like this, it takes about four days," Juremi said. The dried bananas are then smeared with flour and deep-fried. After being drained, the banana chips are ready to be packaged and sold. The sale pisang business has supported many, including farmers and traders who sell raw bananas to cottage industries in Majenang, as well as banana snack makers such as Juremi and Yayat, and the vendors. Majenang district head, Heru Susedyo, said he was aware of the stagnant business situation. "Sale pisang was once so popular that the Cilacap administration planned to make it the icon of Majenang city, but the plan could not be realized because sales keep decreasing." http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/03/06/

Sunday 30 November 2008

melt banana

five to six months to develop. The pods turn to orange or network from a green or yellow color eleven they are ripe and ready for picking. To harvest the pods, farmers use a machete to cut them off the tree. This is why cocoa trees are trimmed to only about twenty feet, because they can shoot up as high as sixty feet. After picking, the cocoa beans or seeds are left to FERMENT for several days, depending on the types of cocoa variety. After fermentation, the seeds are wrinkled and darker in color and lose their overly bitter taste. They are the dried under the sun for another several days and then packed in sacks and shipped into factories. In the factory, the beans are sorted and cleaned and roasted at 450 to 350 degrees for thirty minutes up to two hours. Inside large revolving drums. Making Chocolate Liquor After roasting, the cocoa beans' outer shell are removed, the process of which is called winnowing. The separated shells are sold as animal feeds and the inner nib is crushed and heated until it melts into cocoa butter and then ground into a thick paste called chocolate liquor. Liquor in this case does not mean it contains any alcohol but simply is in liquid form. This chocolate liquor forms the basis of different types of chocolates, including dark, white, and milk chocolate. The concentration of the chocolate liquor will determine the richness of the chocolate's taste. Different Processes for Different Types of Chocolate There are also different processes for making different kinds of chocolate. Dutch-processed cocoa requires an alkali treatment. Without an alkali treatment, the liquor becomes cocoa powder and can be used for baking. To make cocoa powder, 10 to 25 percent of the cocoa butter is extracted from the cocoa liquor using a large press machine. This produces a cakey form, which is then ground and ISPRS using silk, nylon or wire mesh. Dark chocolate is made by combining chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, vanilla and sugar. Milk chocolate is also a combination of those ingredients but has less cocoa liquor and milk is added in the mixture. Diabetic chocolate can be processed like milk or dark chocolate but contains no sugar, and instead make use of sugar alternatives.
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