Smart Kitchen Tech: Innovations for Streamlining Commercial Cooking

Noodle Makers

Noodles are a staple in many cuisine genres. While there are rich traditions for hand-made noodles, the process eats up too much time for many restaurants. If you want to streamline your process, noodle makers produce consistent quality at higher speeds. They save time and money, and they often improve safety.

You can use a Japanese noodle machine to perfect a specialized menu, or you can use general noodle makers to expand your existing menu into new territories. Whether you’re exploring European or Asian food options, noodle makers open doors. Whatever noodles strike your fancy, there’s a machine that can help.

Sous Vide

How do you cook a steak to the perfect doneness every time? You can find different answers to that question: use a smart thermometer, practice timing, or some people do the finger test.

The truth is that none of these methods are quite perfect. Among all of the cooking techniques, only one will produce exact doneness every single time without error: sous vide.

For those who might not already know, sous vide cooking uses a water bath to cook food in vacuum-sealed packages. The system heats the water to an exact temperature and maintains that temperature, and in more advanced models, the system circulates the water in the bath. This circulation improves heat transfers to dramatically lower cooking times.

Because the water never gets higher than the desired temperature, the meat in the sous vide can never be overcooked. As long as you leave the meat in for the prescribed time, it will never be undercooked either.

You get perfect results every time, but there are additional advantages. Sous vide is “drop and leave” cooking. You put your meat in the bath, and you can leave it there. Better yet, it will stay hot, so you don’t necessarily have to cook to order.

And, while steaks make a great example because people want them cooked to different levels, you can cook any type of food in sous vide. Commercial systems are smart, can scale up cooking volume, adjust easily, and give you many more options for cooking that require a lot less personal attention.

Kitchen Management Systems

When it comes to streamlining your kitchen, a little software offers a lot of help. Kitchen management systems add automation and smart data to your business. Mundane tasks that kill your labor efficiency suddenly take almost no time at all:

• Inventory management
• Recipe scaling
• Temperature monitoring and thermometer calibration
• Equipment maintenance scheduling
• Workflow management
• Staff scheduling

Smarter restaurant management bakes efficiency into everything you do. By streamlining everything that happens off of the cooking line, you free up resources for the most essential labor components of your business. Most importantly, you have countless options in this regard. Start by looking for software that already integrates with your existing ordering and management tools.

Refrigeration

Improved refrigeration sounds compelling. Cooling food faster reduces microbial growth, improves shelf life, and makes for safer food conditions. That’s important to everyone in the business.

Better refrigeration also helps with workflow efficiency. If your food doesn’t need as much time to chill, you can rethink your prep cooking processes and find time savings everywhere.

In both cases, blast chillers give you what you need. They utilize a fan to move air inside of the cooling unit, and that lowers food temperatures faster. It’s just like a convection oven, but temperatures move in the opposite direction.

Blast chillers refrigerate and freeze, allowing you to shorten times for both processes.

Pick up Station

The last innovation on the list is the simplest and potentially the most valuable. You don’t need any fancy gadgets — just a little bit of planning.

Food delivery is here. It’s accessible, and it isn’t going away. Streamline your location for food delivery. Make a pick-up window or station. Make it easy for food couriers to do their thing without getting in the way of your other customers.

Delivery services increase your exposure and sales. You can keep up or get left behind, and keeping up is pretty easy. The big delivery companies already make ordering easy (at least compared to building your own delivery service from scratch). You just have to figure out how to hand off your food.

Restaurant innovations change every day. If there’s something specific you want to change in your restaurant, there’s probably already a high-tech way to do it. Keep learning, and you can constantly improve your business.