Working in a busy commercial kitchen can be challenging. Not only do you have to continuously work to prepare the best meals possible, but you also have to keep food and ingredients safe to eat and store.
Fortunately, the modern appliance market boasts a wide range of appliances, such a roll in blast chiller, that can streamline kitchen processes and regulate the temperatures at which food needs to be stored. If you’re not sure whether or not you need a roll-in blast chiller, then this post is a must-read. We explore the key reasons that make this appliance essential.
Roll-In Blast Chillers—Understand the Concept
To understand the roll-in feature, you must know what a regular blast chiller is. Also commonly referred to as a flash freezer, blast chillers is a freezer that’s designed to rapidly cool food to the necessary temperature. With blast freezers, food stays cool without freezing or developing freezer burn.
Enter the roll-in feature. To make blast chillers more effective, manufacturers have added removable trays. These trays usually look like a series of trays stacked together with wheels on the bottom. You can then wheel the trays out to another part of the kitchen where they are packed. Once completed, you simply wheel the trays back in.
Doing this makes it easy to refrigerate items at once, without needing to walk up and down all the time. You can also wheel the tray out to the dining hall when you’re ready to serve bulk desserts or salads.
1. The Roll-In Feature is a Must
The most essential reason for investing in a Roll-In blast chiller is the convince it offers. It streamlines bulk packing and unpacking and allows your team to prepare and store a wide range of dishes at once. There’s also no need for dishes to stand on counters, tables, or trays where they can develop bacteria and become spoiled.
2. You Can Now Boost Your Bulk Sales
Commercial kitchen owners often find it difficult to keep their menus running throughout the year. This happens because many seasonal ingredients can be difficult to find. A simple way to overcome this is to buy in bulk and store ingredients, allowing you to offer seasonal menu items long after the growing period has passed.
Many seasonal produce can effectively be stored in your flash freezer. The roll in feature allows for more shelf space and makes it simpler to pack produce away all at once. Buying in bulk also enables you to take advantage of the discounts offered by buying in bulk.
3. Super Easy to Maintain Food Quality
Quality and consistency are two of the key attributes that make a commercial kitchen successful. Whether you’re running a corner café that serves light lunches, or you have a restaurant kitchen that puts out meals all day, you will need a way to keep food and ingredients well within the “safe-to-eat” range.
You can easily achieve this by storing food in a blast chiller. Since food gets rapidly cooled, there’s no risk of your food over-freezing or developing freezer burn. In normal fridges, food that has developed freezer burn becomes soggy and loses flavour. When you take food out of the flash freezer, it can easily be warmed, cooked, or served. There’s no need for freezing and defrosting.
4. It Makes Food Prep Easy
One of the most time consuming aspects in any kitchen is without a doubt the food prep that goes into getting every meal service ready. This often involves an extensive amount of peeling, chopping, pre-cooking, and then refrigerating.
To avoid food spoiling, many kitchen staff do meal prep as close to the meal service as possible, which can be stressful as there are usually so many other aspects to focus on as well. While a blast chiller won’t streamline the chopping process, it can simplify meal prep by enabling you to do it at a time that best suits you.
Having a blast chiller allows you to prepare your food in advance, freeing up more time and streamlining your food prep process. All you have to do is calculate the time each meal or ingredient requires to remain cool, set your blast chiller, and store. Using the roll-in feature adds to the simplicity of your overall meal prep.
5. Allows for Versatility in Your Cooling Process
Another huge reason to invest in a blast chiller is versatility. You can easily cool everything on your menu to the desired temperature. This can include the following:
- Salads
- Prepared meals
- Sauces
- Marinades
- Desserts
- Ice cream and sorbets
- Drinks (including wine that just needs to be quickly chilled before serving)
- Fruit and vegetables
Final Thoughts
A blast chiller is an asset to every commercial kitchen. Adding the roll-in feature goes a long way to enhancing the overall benefits of using a flash freezer for preparing everything from salads and marinades to desserts and sorbets. Keeping your food healthy, cool, and delicious has never been easier!