Commercial kitchens demand equipment that is top of the line, easy to use and keep clean, and most importantly, energy efficient. Hotelier India takes a look at the latest products and trends in the market.
Appliances are the workhorses of a restaurant kitchen and choosing the correct commercial food equipment is vital to any food service business. A full service restaurant’s food preparation equipment needs are vastly different from a café or bakery shop.
Executive Chef Sahdev Mehta, Courtyard by Marriott, Pune Hinjewadi explains, “Though the actual cooking equipment stays the same for most kitchens, a specialty kitchen will have different hot/cold cooking equipment. For instance, pan Asian will need all wok ranges and deep fat fryers with a steamer thrown in.
A western kitchen will have a gas range quartet with an oven and a Bain Marie. Likewise an Indian restaurant kitchen will be fitted with a couple of tandoors and dosa plate if there’s south Indian food.”
Other factors that influence the equipment choices are budget, space, staffing and standards as desired by the restaurant. Chef Parampreet Luthra from The O Experience restaurant complex, New Delhi adds, “Though the equipment choices are governed primarily by the restaurant cuisine and menu, one also needs to prioritise equipment purchase on the basis of space and budget.”
Therefore a popular trend in kitchen design is a modular approach where wall ovens separate from cooktops let one create several cooking workstations.
For example, two-oven stoves, with one oven below the cooking surface and the other well above at cabinet height and a double wall oven that stacks two ovens to save space and deliver twice the baking/roasting capacity are preferred by most chefs.
Undoubtedly, the hub of a kitchen is the stove or oven, the choice of which depends on the type of cooking involved.
“Gas deck ovens are specially designed with maximum front glass visibility to show ‘live baking’ to the customers, which shows freshness of the products whereas rotary rack ovens are the big capacity ovens usually used for mass productions where a whole trolley is inserted into the oven,” elaborates Vikrant Patil and Milind Umredkar, Directors Orange Foodstuff Equipment Pvt Ltd, manufacturers of cooking appliances.
When it comes to choosing ovens many serious cooks prefer gas for its instant response, precise controllability, and lower operating cost over time, yet others praise the evenness of electric heat and the lower initial cost of the appliance. Now also available are ranges with “dual fuel” that lets chefs mix gas and electric heat sources; and electric convection ovens that rely on radiant heating action to cook up twice as fast as conventional ovens while a combination oven combines three modes of cooking – steam, hot air, and a combination of both to efficiently steam, poach, roast, broil, bake and re-thermalise.
Also available are induction ovens that save precious minutes by bringing water to a boil faster than gas or electric cooktops, as well as saving on clean-up time because spills won’t cook onto the stovetop.
Moreover, Electrolux has introduced Inspiro, an intelligent oven that uses heat management technology and a database of
professional cooking techniques to automatically cook dishes to perfection.
Electrolux has also recently launched an air-o-steam Touchline oven which has a user friendly control panel that uses the same intuitive technology as cutting edge mobile phones and elminates the need for instruction manuals.
According to chefs, apart from ovens, deep fryers and grillers are the next important appliances in a kitchen.While the gas fryer contains a cold area at the bottom to catch crumbs before they stick to the rest of the fried food, the electric fryer cooks food thoroughly at consistent temperatures.
Comparing the two, chefs say advantages of gas fryers are quick heat up time, more efficiency and lower costs due to cheaper natural gas. In grillers, segment restaurants either use gas or electric grill to prepare grilled meats, salamanders for overhead grilling or toasting and browning of gratin dishes, melting cheeses onto sandwiches and caramelising desserts such as crème brûlée.
In addition, charbroiling grills are being used to give a slightly charred texture to food, whereas latest thermostatically-controlled, pellet-fired charbroiler from Cookshack, Vulcan and Hobart can add the flavour of real wood smoke to the grilled food for authenticity.
A truly versatile piece of restaurant equipment is the food warmer; this appliance can not only hold full size or fractional food pans but with an optional adapter can be converted to a soup warmer too. While most food warmers are designed for “wet” operation, some food warmers can be used as a “dry” operation, without using water at all.
However as the dry operation can recook food, a full size food warmer in the “wet” operation is preferred. As a matter of fact, kitchen appliances segment is an extremely specialised field where different manufacturers specialise in different kitchen scopes.
For example, Holten Hood does cooling and ventilation systems, MKN offers great electric smoke grills, Ceran induction plates are sturdy and Staub, Le Creuset and ATC produce high quality cooking and serving equipment.
Also with the proliferation of quick service and multi-cuisine restaurants, there has been an increased demand for hi-tech kitchen equipment like the blast chiller to reduce hot food temperature instantly to prevent multiplication of bacteria and energy efficient equipment like convention oven, cook and hold oven, and combitherms oven.
Ashutosh Nerlekar Chef de Cuisine of Olio in Novotel Mumbai, Juhu Beach agrees, “The food and beverage industry has seen major trends, Pacojet is a new trend useful to make ice -creams and sorbets in-house and induction cookers are a norm rather than the exception. Also gas syringes to create foams are getting popular.”
An extremely important part of any professional kitchen is a ventilation system. Exhaust hoods over gas ranges/tandoors with the right placement, filters and fan ensures that the kitchen is smoke free and that the freshness is maintained, resulting in better ventilation for chefs and food.
Sahdev Mehta comments, “It is an important but unfortunately sore point with most chefs, that the latent heat and generated heat in a kitchen makes an effective ventilation system vital for kitchen operation.
The ventilation units cannot usually be produced uniformly and fitted everywhere, so larger restaurants custom-build their systems and fittings with the vendors, which depend on space enclosed, meal periods, location and equipment used.”
In fact, common in many restaurant applications is a Type I hood, which is the centrifugal extractor hood or makeup air systems that can be conventional or short cycle and is connected to the central HVAC system.
A relatively new entrant in the commercial kitchen ventilation world is the “smart vent hood,” which uses measurements from photoelectric smoke and heat detectors to determine the proper ventilation rates.
For instance, Intelli-Hood by Melink is a demand control kitchen ventilation systemthat responds to variations in appliance use, allowing fans to regulate exhaust and make-up airflow as necessary.
Besides, with almost all restaurants having open kitchen as the major part, they need more sophisticated and powerful ventilation systems, which should also be guest friendly, as silent as possible and chic looking.
Although most offerings in a live kitchen are smoke free such as a salad bar, carvery and pasta station, if there are grills installed then exhaust fans are placed in such a way that they extract the smoke and prevent it from entering the guest area or the chef’s areas.
Furthermore, in keeping with the green trend, there is a growing number of highly energy efficient foodservice equipment available like modern cooking induction systems that are auto activated when the cooking sensor is on, reducing energy wastage in a big way.
All quartet fire ranges too come with low density pilots to save gas energy expended uselessly in restaurants. Ashutosh Nerlekar continues, “The use of CNG is advisable rather than using electricity. Now wherever possible, electricity is changed to CNG usage for ovens, steam kettles and bain maries. ”Chefs also recommend braising (pot roasting) or stewing as energy saving cooking methods and using convection oven as it spreads heat evenly saving energy by 20%.
In spite of the huge demand, restaurateurs in India still have to import much of the kitchen equipment. High equipment also costs much more due to import duties, long procurement time while servicing and spare parts availability are major concerns. On the other hand, chefs complain that locally manufactured products and suppliers lack quality and reliability.
Expressing a different view SumeetSobti, owner Apex India, service partner for Hobart equipment in India says, “Availability of Hobart appliances is no longer a problem; also, we as a service partners, offer all kinds of timely service to our customers.”
Chef Parampreet Luthra adds, “Availability of equipment is not a real problem but ensuring timely delivery, pricing, their maintenance and repairs can sometimes be a real challenge. Moreover, importing damaged and non-repairable minor parts shoots up your costs.
Ideally, an organisation should prefer to install Indian manufactured products and variations of many equipment are readily available with repairable warranty.” Ashutosh Nerlekar adds optimistically, “Although we still have to import much of the equipment, maintenance of these is sorted out to quite an extent. We are moving up the ladder.”
