In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/024,108, filed Feb. 17, 1998, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,988,048 Thomas Hunter and Neil Trager described a process for preparing a unified serving of a coated food. The process described in that application comprises providing multiple pieces of a food to be cooked, coating each piece with an expandable batter, immersing the coated pieces in a mold in a deep-frying medium in order to cook the food, expand the batter, and join the battered pieces into a shaped food product that reflects the shape of the mold, and removing the shaped food product from the deep-frying medium and the mold. The disclosure of said application Ser. No. 09/024,108 is expressly incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
FIGS. 2 and 3 illustrate a cooking vessel in accordance with the invention of SN 09/024,108. The cooking vessel of FIG. 2 is made of flat metal. FIG. 3 shows a sectional side view, along line 3--3 of FIG. 2, of the same cooking vessel. As shown in FIG. 3, the cooking vessel takes the form of a basket 40 having a flat-bottomed interior 21, a flat-bottomed exterior 25, a substantially vertical outer wall 22, and an inner ring 42 with substantially vertical walls 23. FIG. 2 shows a perspective view of the same basket 40. In FIG. 2, apertures 41 are visible.
Hunter and Trager recognized in principle that binding together of frozen or defrosted pieces of food into a unitary shaped food product could be facilitated by spraying them with a thin batter or water mist, see page 3, lines 11-20, of SN 09/024,108. No further information is given in that application regarding the thin batter or water mist. We have now discovered thin batter mist formulations that are particularly well suited for the facilitation of the binding together of frozen or defrosted pieces of food in the context of the preparation of unified servings of deep-fried foodstuffs, both in the "back-of-the-house" or restaurant context and in the context of large scale processor applications.