Keeping your cool
The refrigerator does not excite the interest of chefs in quite the same way as a combi-oven or high-speed food mixer. But few caterers who have bought fridge and freezer cabinets in the past three years would deny the plethora of design improvements, mostly stimulated by the demands of the Food Safety Act 1990.
For Dorothy Wright, catering adviser at the foodservice division of Nestlé UK, the digital temperature read-out is a major contributor to a more efficient kitchen. Nestlé's headquarters in Croydon, Surrey, has an array of double and single upright Foster cabinets, a chiller room, a walk-in freezer plus chill-well servery and a blown-air sandwich and snack display. All are fitted with electronic LED (light-emitting diode) displays.
Wright finds that the electronic display provides at-a-glance temperature readings and warns if there are any problems - a light which flashes on and off quickly alerts kitchen staff if a door is left open or a malfunction has occurred. "They are far better from an operator's point of view," she says. Thermometers fitted on earlier cabinets mostly had small wheel-type displays or gauges sited just above floor level. "The chef more or less had to lie on his stomach with a pair of binoculars to read them," Wright comments.
Andrew Allen, county catering officer at Hampshire County Council, also singles out the electronic controller as a big improvement. As the person responsible for equipping institutional catering facilities throughout the county, including more than 600 schools, the police force and meals-on-wheels, Allen is especially enthusiastic about the latest generation of controllers which provide a printed history of temperature performance.
PROBES
He recently purchased Sadia cabinets with these units, in the shape of internal probes linked to a micro-chip memory and a small internal printer. A "ticket" can be printed out to show temperature performance over the previous week. The extra cost on standard cabinet price is about £200 - "very little compared with the saving in labour and time", according to Allen.
The facility has proved especially useful at sites where sandwich packs are loaded into cabinets each day and there are no catering staff to carry out constant checks.
Many of the county's establishments still have conventional digital read-outs from which data is recorded manually in the usual manner. While these clearly show the cabinet air temperature, Allen questions how useful that is.
His dealings with a liaison group involving environmental health officers across Hampshire's 14 different districts suggest that cabinet read-outs based on an internal probe - as with the "ticket" system - are a more effective way of indicating food temperature.
Allen has looked at ways of adapting existing cabinets with devices such as the Plastic Chicken. This portable unit is placed inside cabinets, and provides continuous records of the cabinet's performance via a hand-held terminal.
He is also impressed by more sophisticated solutions such as Monica, where whole networks of cabinets are cabled up with their temperature records accessed remotely on a central personal computer. "It's a marvellous solution, but I have 600 school kitchens with an average of three types of refrigerator in each kitchen and the money is not readily available," he points out.
IMPROVEMENT
Of the other improvements in refrigeration design, Allen singles out top-mounted refrigeration units which become self-contained modules or "cassettes".
The main advantage is if a breakdown occurs. The "guts" of the refrigerator can be removed in one piece in a couple of minutes, with the door remaining shut while the unit is repaired. If there is a major problem, a replacement unit can simply be slotted in and the damaged system taken back to the maintenance depot rather than causing disruption in the kitchen.
A secondary benefit, he says, is that a refrigerator can quickly be converted into a freezer by switching over to a unit with a more powerful compressor. This, he says, could be significant in schools which want to switch to frozen meals. "It means we could change to freezer cabinets straight away without having to pay the full cost," he points out.
SIZING
In many kitchens, the most significant improvement in cabinet design has been in the much wider choice of shapes and sizes.
Alastair Little, chef-proprietor of the central London restaurant which bears his name, has found refrigerated tables a boon because he can locate refrigerated storage directly at the point of use, while providing plenty of preparation space. He has used four Alpeninox counter fridges in his kitchen for several years.
"They are not cheap, but they save a lot of work," he observes, although he warns would-be users to make sure they get ones with a good, strong top. "Some of the cheaper ones have tops which are poorly insulated and bounce around when you chop things on them."
At the National Theatre in London's South Bank, head of catering Barry Rushmer was confronted with a similar need for compact, point-of-use refrigeration when the main restaurant was refurbished last year. To squeeze as much bottle stock as possible into the available space, he needed half-height cabinets.
A few years ago, there would have been little choice apart from domestic refrigeration, but he wanted a professional specification with stainless steel inside and out. The cabinets he chose - Silverwing Mini-Pantry fridges - conformed to this need with a 134-litre capacity in each cabinet and a CFC-free refrigeration system.
As well as the growing availability of special sizes, Rushmer has found a welcome growth in the choice of finishes, such as polished steel, satin steel, aluminium and stoved enamel. "It was a stretch to get that sort of choice a few years ago," he says. o
