This invention relates to fast-food meals.
This patent application deals only with Asian dishes that are juicy with sauces, and that are served with cooked rice traditionally. In such traditional Asian meals, the sauces are salty or/and strongly flavored, and cooked rice is needed to neutralize the taste.
As the social mobility increases, it is desirable to develop fast-food items that could satisfy the need of people on the go. However, the presence of Asian meals is insignificant in the fast-food business sector.
A popular Western meal is a steak served with breads. Hamburger resembles it: meat between bread buns.
Such convenient conversion is not easy for the Asian meals under consideration, namely, Asian dishes accompanied by cooked rice. Unlike steak, such a meal is soak-wet with a sauce, and quite fragmented. The juicy sauces often carry strong smell and color, and the fragmented pieces could fall down. If such an Asian is to be packaged into a hand-held fast-food pack improperly, eating it could become quite quickly.
The referred patent application Ser. No. 60/540,684, titled, “FAST-FOOD PACKAGING OF ORIENTAL MEALS, AND METHOD OF DISTRIBUTION” teaches a fast-food packing means, in which ingredients are prepared and cooked in small sizes, and enclosed inside a wrapping medium.
On one hand, since the wrapping medium is a foreign element, being absent in the traditional Asian dish, it is desirable that the wrap is rather thin and of a minimal amount so as not to interfere with the traditional taste of the dish.
On the other hand, the wrap should be strong and resilient enough to withstand the handling by humans, and the wetting by the sauce.
These two requirements are mutually contradicting, necessitating certain optimization effort in choosing the wrap material, determining the thickness, and devising the packaging process.
Also, the size of the fast-food packs should remain rather small: a bite size or close to it. Otherwise, the packs could lose their firmness and the shape, and even get wet, torn, and messy, during the handling and eating. This could be prevented if the wrap is quite thick. But then the taste is altered.
Accordingly, it is desirable to come up with a packing means that could be applicable to a large size fast-food pack as well as to a bite-size. A large size fast-food pack is desirable in some circumstances.
By the way, another consideration is the shape of the fast-food packs. Wontons and egg-rolls are wrapped manually, as have been done over thousands of years, and it shows. People do not mind the traditional shapes of the wontons and egg-rolls in an Asian restaurant. However, if Asian meals are to become bona fide fast-food items that are universally accepted, especially by young people, and are to be consumed in a public place such as an office or a ballpark, at any time of the day, the shape should look more ‘modern’. The shape should have a look that appears having been produced by a machine, not by human fingers. Preferred shape would be of oval, cylindrical, spherical, cubical, rectangular, or cubical.
Accordingly, it is the objective of this patent application to devise novel Asian fast-food embodiments that satisfy the requirements listed above, including the needs for bigger size fast-food packs and desirability of ‘modern’ geometrical shapes.
This objective is achieved by using the accompanying rice as the basic supporting structure or the strengthening member in defining and retaining the shape of the fast-food packs.
That is, the cooked rice provides the embodiment to a juicy and fragmented Asian dish item.
A wrapping medium is employed when necessary to seal off the juicy and fragmented Asian dish item completely.
Slight browning by heat of the surface makes a lump of cooked rice more rugged in terms of the structural strength.
An embodiment resembling the hamburger bun is also disclosed.
FIGS. 2 (a), (b), and (c) show the rectangular fast-food pack of
FIGS. 3 (a), (b), and (c) show the circular fast-food pack shown in
An Asian dish item 1, such as Teriyaki Chicken, Bool-Ko-Ki (marinated and then broiled beef), or Mongolian Beef, is shown on a serving dish 2 in a highly schematic and symbolic fashion.
Such dish items are rather salty or/and strongly flavored, and are traditionally accompanied by a cooked rice 3 contained in a bowl. The rice neutralizes the saltiness and the strong flavor. The rice also provides extra nutrition.
By the way, the sizes of the ingredients of the Asian dish item 1 are often too large or too long to be packaged into a bite-size pack. As described in detail in the referred patent application Ser. No. 60/540,684, titled, “FAST-FOOD PACKAGING OF ORIENTAL MEALS, AND METHOD OF DISTRIBUTION”, the ingredients need to be prepared in smaller sizes in general, and preferably cooked separately. We assume that such measures are taken in this divisional-in-part application.
The Asian dish item 1 is quite juicy and fragmented, and does not have the firmness to form a certain geometrical shape by themselves alone
On the other hand, the cooked rice 3 can be shaped into a certain geometrical form such as a block form 3a and 3b, or cylindrical form 3m and 3n, as depicted in
Then the fragmented and juicy Asian dish item 1 may be inserted into the space 1a (or 1m) created by the lumps of the cooked rice 3a and 3b (or 3m and 3n), as indicated by the arrows in
A cover 5a or 5b is used to complete the enclosure of the juicy and fragmented Asian dish item 1 in the rice containers 3q, 3r, and 3s.
One way of looking at this packaging process is a linearization of a traditional meal. When a person eats the Asian meal from the dish 2 and the bowl 4, his chopsticks or forks travel in the two-dimensional space of the X-Y, as indicated in
In order to make the reservoirs made of cooked rice, depicted above from
Addition of foreign substances into the rice also could help making the rice reservoirs of the present invention stronger and more rugged.
The surface of the rice buns in
The gap between the two buns of
The fast-food packs would get soggy and even spoiled when left on the serving shelf for a prolonged time. Some meals will not be as popular as others, and eventually will get staled and even spoiled. That is why Chinese restaurants cook each dish only after an order is in.
Accordingly, unlike the existing fast-food items, the oriental fast-food items would have to be kept in a frozen state if a full-scale fast-food service is considered.
After 20, 40, or even 100 different kinds of oriental meals are manufactured and packaged in a factory, the packages could be frozen immediately, as depicted in a flowchart of
Due to the unusual ways of preparing and cooking, it would be more economical for the production to be highly mechanized and automated. Otherwise, the quality would be poor, and very importantly, the manufacturing cost will be too high to be affordable to the consumers.
Accordingly, the production should be highly centralized, instead of being done in an individual fast-food restaurant, as depicted in
It would be more convenient that the fast-food packs be frozen as soon as prepared, and kept in the frozen state through the shipment to a ‘retail location’, or ‘chain store’, and also during the storage and display in the retail locations, until they are being readied for consumption by consumers.
‘Retail locations’ are defined in this patent application as places where the fast-food packs are sold to consumers, and include convenient stores, fast-food restaurants, deli shops, vending trucks, automated vending machines, etc.
Obviously many modifications and variations of the present invention are possible in light of the above teachings. It is therefore to be understood that, within the scope of the appended claims, the invention may be practiced otherwise than as specifically described.
This patent application is a continuation-in-part application of provisional patent applications 60/549,261, titled, “ASIAN FAST-FOOD PACKS EMBODIED BY THE ACCOMPANYING COOKED RICE”, and 60/540,684, titled, “FAST-FOOD PACKAGING OF ORIENTAL MEALS, AND METHOD OF DISTRIBUTION”.