The Commercial Kitchen Blog

5  Major things to relate to before you decide to get yourself a commercial kitchen:

1. The size of your commercial kitchen – Do you know how many people are you preparing to feed daily? 1,000? 5,000? 20,000? The answer will be the most important element in determining the size of the kitchen that you need.
   
   

2. Getting Your Permit – Before you start even planning your commercial kitchen make sure that you are aware of all the permits you need in order to operate a kitchen in your area. Make sure you know all the different requirements including but not limited to: food safety, electricity, plumbing, insurance (mostly fire and injuries), hygiene, air conditioning, waste treatment, kitchen lightning, building inspection (cabinets, ovens, sinks etc) and many more.
   Remember – you are building your kitchen for the permits as you are building it for you business.
   

3. Storage – Storage will take a big portion of your commercial kitchen: vegetable storage, cleaning materials storage, frozen food storage, cooked food storage, cookware storage etc.
   
   

4. Coolers & Freezers – As you’ll soon learn, if you don’t know it already – every type of food (vegetables, fish, meat, eggs etc) and every step in the manufacturing process (frozen food, raw food, semi cooked food, cooked food) needs its own cooling and freezing solutions.
   If you are planning to produce only one type of food or only frozen food for example – that will influence your kitchens plan.

5. Departments – According to the variety of food that you are going to produce you’ll need to build the appropriate departments (in a future post I will specify what each department needs):
   - Salads & Vegetables processing department
   - The cooking department
   - Stuffed food department (mushrooms, peppers, cabbage etc.)
   - Meat processing department
   - Fish processing department
   - Packing & delivery department
   - Waste treatment & cleaning department

 
A commercial kitchen isn’t an easy business but if it runs in your blood then you’ll overcome all the obstacles and you’ll run a commercial kitchen that you can be proud of!

11 Things you should know about cutting boards

1. Always choose either plastic or wood cutting boards. Glass and marble are way too hard for your blade. (and still i made a post on where to buy a marble board? since i was asked to do so)
2. Always keep a piece of steel next to your cutting board. Every once in a while brush your knife on the steel to maintain the edge. If you’ll look after your knifes it doesn’t really matter what board you’ll choose as long as its either wood or plastic.
3. Always wash your cutting board then cut another product. Never cut a cook product right after a raw product before washing the board. It’s important to wash the board after you cut any raw product.
4. Why choose wood? Wood gives way a little and does not dull your knife as quickly.
5. Another reason to go with wood is that wood boards are toxic to bacteria according to recent research – once you used your board, bacteria can find its way to your cuts and if you won’t clean it properly you’ll find mould there pretty soon picking wood board will make your food much safer.
6. Why choose plastic? Some chefs prefer plastic boards when cutting raw meat and wood board for vegetables because you can wash or even throw away a plastic board much quickly.
7. Another reason to go with plastic is that they are much cheaper and easier to use (lighter).
8. If you go for a wood board a good way to clean it would be to sprinkle some salt on it and leave it for 5-10 minutes, you can then scrub it dry with a wire brush. You can even use some olive oil (or any other cheap oil) to oil it once in a while.
9. If you have a plastic cutting board – make sure you read my post on how to clean a plastic cutting board?
10. When buying a wood cutting board go for end grain which is much better for your knives than edge grain.
11. When using a wood cutting board don’t put it on a wet towel or wet counter, this may cause your board to wrap. If you want to hold your board in place – use a rubber shelf liner.

Good Luck

BTW
If you wonder where you can buy cutting boards online here are some good sites to check out:

Large Selection of All Types of Cutting Boards

John Boos Wooden Cutting Board

Unique Bamboo Cutting Boards

Plastic cutting board care

How are you cleaning your plastic boards?

After using a plastic cutting board for a while and cleaning it with some water and soap or even chlorine, it can still get really scored or stained after a while. So what can you do then?

Use a metal scourer and liquid soap to scrub the board and put them in the dishwasher.

1. If it didn’t help try to bleach them and put them to the dishwasher again. (don’t bleach the board too often or it’ll eat up your plastic)
2. If it still doesn’t help try to use a sander or sand paper. Remove part of the plastic with a coarse sand paper use the fine one smooth the plastic board when you finish.
   Just make sure you go over the entire board with each sand paper or you will have many valleys in your board and you’ll have to throw it away.
3. You can always try acid but most of the time its hard to control the burn of the acid and soon you find yourself with a plastic cutting board that looks like a sponge.
   

   

If you want to share your experience – this is the place…

Or More Exactly - Where to Buy Cheapest Cookware Sets On Line

A lot of people ask me where to buy cookware online? Well I m sure there are a lot of great stores out there but I can recommend only those I bought from in the past or those that I heard people recommend of. If you want to comment or suggest more online stores – just leave a comment.

Here are the online stores to visit before you buy cookware online:

1. Metro kitchen – one of the best online stores for all clad cookware and they offer free shipping on orders over $49.
2. Absolute home – they have interesting special offers and during specific times also free shipping.
3. Instawares – The restaurant supply superstore

And two more online sores that I got recommendations of:

1. KlinQ.com – they also have free ground shipping on orders over $99.
2. Kitchen collection – Another good online store but I must say I don’t like the site navigation so much.

Do you buy online from other places as well? Let me know and I’ll add them to this post.

If you don’t know how to buy cookware – make sure to read how to buy cookware post.

How to Buy Cookware?

7 questions to ask yourself before you buy cookware

During our cooking life all of us had to deal with the question – how to buy cookware? The answer isn’t so complicated as long as you know what YOU need.

You see, the biggest problem beginners deal with isn’t the lack of knowledge about the different types and brands that they can find out there. The problem is mostly not knowing and truly understanding what they need.

So the first step in knowing how to buy cookware starts from asking the right questions:

Question #1:
Do you have already these 4 pieces of kitchen equipment?

1. A saute pan with + lid

2. A fry pan

3. A saucepan with + lid

4. A chef’s knife

Question #2:

What are you going to cook?

- Are you roasting? (a roasting pan)

- Are you sauteing? (a sauté pan)

- Are you souping or making pasta? (a stockpot)

Question #3:

How many people are you cooking for?
How many people will use the pots and pans?

The more people the more durable, easier to clean and to use pots and pans you’ll need. (if its a lot then maybe you should lean towards stainless steel cookware)

Question #4:

What’s your budget?

Question #5:

Do you care deeply if your pots and pans match?

If not – never buy sets. They include many unnecessary pieces and its always better to buy cookware individually.

Question #6:

What kind of stove top do you have?

A glass top stove (why did you buy it in the first place?) requires cookware with a flat bottom or your food will cook unevenly. So make sure that the cookware you buy have a flat bottom or that they say that they are meant for glass top ovens.

Question #7:

How are the handles connected to the pots?

Always go for riveted handles which are more durable, also welded handles are fine and only last come the screwed handles.

And here are 3 more things to make sure of when buying cookware:

1. Get a Lifetime warranty
2. Choose lighter cookwares which are easier to use.
3. Make sure that what you buy is comfortable for YOU.

Good luck and make sure to read where to buy cookware online?