The use and abuse of cooking ranges
Whether it's a basic open-top four-burner with oven underneath or a high-specification island suite designed to cope with anything, a cooking range should provide caterers with optimum performance and ease of maintenance. But manufacturers can only supply and install the equipment. Once the range is installed, the training finished and the cooking begins, the head chef is in control.
That control is not just about turning dials and knobs, but about looking after the range. Compared with something like a combi-oven - with its microprocessors, cooking programmes, water and heat - a cooking range is quite straightforward. Although a lot of technical design goes into cooking ranges, mainly in areas such as burner efficiency and ease of cleaning, they are not complicated to learn how to use and the operation manual is not very long. Yet the equipment's apparent simplicity is both its advantage and its downfall when it comes to maintenance.
As a development chef for an equipment manufacturer, my job takes me around kitchens all over Britain. I show chefs how to get the best from the equipment they buy. I'm not a service engineer, but often I see cooking ranges not being looked after properly. Chefs will take great care with the combi-oven, but the poor old cooking range? The attitude tends to be that, as they are made out of cast iron, they can stand all you throw at them: kicking the door shut, and spilling soups and sauces over the pan supports. That is fine if you want to pay a service engineer to poke out bits of food from the burner jets and remove congealed fat from the door hinges, but these are tasks that should be part of a scheduled cleaning rota.
Although simple and robust in construction, if cooking ranges are not given the same level of care as every other item of prime cooking equipment in the kitchen, don't blame the service engineer when the bill comes through the letterbox.
So how can chefs reduce the service cost on cooking ranges? Every professional kitchen should have a daily cleaning routine for stainless-steel work surfaces, the deep-fat fryer and the combi-oven. Too often, the cooking range is neglected until time allows. Proper daily cleaning will have a positive impact on servicing and repair costs. Service engineers will be able to diagnose any problems more easily and quickly, saving money on labour time and reducing equipment downtime. Of course, in busy service times the kitchen team is focused on getting the food out and not on cleaning, but a spillage left on the range just gets baked on and takes three times as long to clean off after service.
Island suites are the easiest to clean during food service because they are often made of polished stainless steel that will wipe off easily. Solid-top ranges are also easier to clean, as spilled food will often just caramelise to a black dust and the smoke will disappear up the extraction system. Open-top burners are where clean-as-you- work routines can be difficult because of all the places into which spilt food can drip. But even if just the worst of the spillage is cleaned up, it will save time when the real cleaning is done.
Training the kitchen team not to abuse the cooking range will also reduce servicing costs. It used to be regular macho kitchen practice to slam and kick oven doors to close them, or even to stand on a drop-down oven door to reach a pan. That attitude is changing, but it is far from gone. All oven doors are made with closing mechanisms that work with a firm push. Any head chef who hears an oven door bounce shut should remind staff that kicking and slamming is both unnecessary and costly.
Door hinges are another regular victim of abuse. Some cooking ranges are still floor-mounted, but increasingly they are being fitted with castors so that they can be moved easily to clean beneath and behind. The power cable or gas connector is on a flexible lead, so kitchen staff tend to drag the cooking range away from the wall by pulling on the door handles. Then they blame the manufacturer when the hinges warp and the oven door doesn't close properly any more.
Neil Roseweir is development chef for Falcon Foodservice Equipment
