A variety of impressionable food products are prepared and sold commercially. For instance, prepared doughs for cookies and the like are frequently sold to consumers so they can make "home made" baked goods quickly and easily. Such doughs are usually packaged for sale to consumers with a sufficient quantity in each package to prepare a "batch" of baked goods. To prepare the baked goods, a consumer need only open the package, divide the dough into individual portions (e.g. a quantity of dough for a single cookie) and bake the dough.
Depending on the nature of the baked goods, a single batch of the baked goods can include a dozen or more individual portions. For instance, commercially prepared cookie doughs will frequently be sold in packages containing sufficient dough to prepare as many as three dozen standard-size cookies. When the consumer is dividing the dough into individual portions before baking, it can be difficult to accurately gauge the mount of dough in a single individual portion. For instance, if a consumer is informed that a package of dough should be divided into 36 equal portions for baking three dozen cookies, it is virtually impossible for the consumer to accurately gauge one thirty-sixth of the dough. Accordingly, the size of one cookie can vary quite a bit from others in the same batch.
Some manufacturers sell their prepared doughs in a large, unshaped mass. For instance, the dough may be sold in a standard pint-sized container of the type used in the ice-cream industry. Such packages will usually tell the consumer the amount of dough to be used for each cookie, e.g. one tablespoon, and the consumer can measure out about the same amount of dough for each individual portion with a measuring device. Although this enables a careful consumer to make a relatively uniformly-sized batch of baked goods, the shape of the baked goods will be irregular. This method will generally only work for so-called "drop" cookies and the like.
Some manufacturers sell prepared doughs in elongate, generally tubular packages. This permits a consumer to slice the dough generally orthogonal to the axis of the generally cylindrical dough into a series of disk-shaped segments which have a relatively uniform round shape. This is particularly appealing in the case of cookie doughs as the resulting fiat, well rounded baked cookies are deemed to be visually more appealing than "drop" cookies. However, without the aid of a measuring device it can be quite difficult for a consumer to accurately subdivide a long cylinder of dough into the proper number of individual portions. Accordingly, the consumer will frequently end up with a batch of baked goods which are fairly uniformly shaped but can vary significantly in size.
Obviously, if a consumer were to subdivide a long cylinder of dough into accurately sized portions with a measuring device such as a tablespoon the advantageous round shape of the cylindrical dough would be lost. Some manufacturers have attempted to give the consumer some guidance in subdividing the dough into individual portions by placing evenly spaced hash marks on the exterior of the package, not unlike the hash marks appearing on sticks of butter.
This approach works well for butter because refrigerated butter tends to be relatively hard and can be sliced with a knife. Dough which is ready for baking tends to be softer (i.e. is more easily plastically deformed), though, and is not as readily sliced through the package as is butter. Instead of producing uniformly sized, well rounded portions of dough, slicing the dough through a marked plastic package will tend to deform the dough into irregular shapes and the dough will tend to flow during cutting, leading to different quantities of dough in different cookies.
Others have attempted to mark the dough itself, permitting consumers to remove the dough from the package and cut the dough along predefined hash marks. However, different types of dough tend to have noticeably different impressionabilities, i.e. some doughs are more readily marked through plastic deformation than others. For instance, doughs for sugar cookies tends to be more impressionable than doughs for peanut butter cookies.
When installing a marking device on a commercial production line, the same marking device could mark some doughs more readily than others. Thus, some of the less impressionable doughs may have barely perceptible markings while other, more impressionable doughs can have rather prominent gashes along their length.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a means for reproducibly marking doughs with graduated hash marks for consumers to use as slicing guides. The marking device should be readily adjusted to account for variations in the impressionability of doughs from one type of dough to another, or one batch of dough to another.