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Commercial kitchens demand equipment that is top of the line, easy to use and keep clean, and most importantly, energy efficient. Hotelier India takes a look at the latest products and trends in the market.

Appliances are the workhorses of a restaurant kitchen and choosing the correct commercial food equipment is vital to any food service business. A full service restaurant’s food preparation equipment needs are vastly different from a café or bakery shop.

Executive Chef Sahdev Mehta, Courtyard by Marriott, Pune Hinjewadi explains, “Though the actual cooking equipment stays the same for most kitchens, a specialty kitchen will have different hot/cold cooking equipment. For instance, pan Asian will need all wok ranges and deep fat fryers with a steamer thrown in.

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A western kitchen will have a gas range quartet with an oven and a Bain Marie. Likewise an Indian restaurant kitchen will be fitted with a couple of tandoors and dosa plate if there’s south Indian food.”

Other factors that influence the equipment choices are budget, space, staffing and standards as desired by the restaurant. Chef Parampreet Luthra from The O Experience restaurant complex, New Delhi adds, “Though the equipment choices are governed primarily by the restaurant cuisine and menu, one also needs to prioritise equipment purchase on the basis of space and budget.”

Therefore a popular trend in kitchen design is a modular approach where wall ovens separate from cooktops let one create several cooking workstations.

For example, two-oven stoves, with one oven below the cooking surface and the other well above at cabinet height and a double wall oven that stacks two ovens to save space and deliver twice the baking/roasting capacity are preferred by most chefs.

Undoubtedly, the hub of a kitchen is the stove or oven, the choice of which depends on the type of cooking involved.

“Gas deck ovens are specially designed with maximum front glass visibility to show ‘live baking’ to the customers, which shows freshness of the products whereas rotary rack ovens are the big capacity ovens usually used for mass productions where a whole trolley is inserted into the oven,” elaborates Vikrant Patil and Milind Umredkar, Directors Orange Foodstuff Equipment Pvt Ltd, manufacturers of cooking appliances.

When it comes to choosing ovens many serious cooks prefer gas for its instant response, precise controllability, and lower operating cost over time, yet others praise the evenness of electric heat and the lower initial cost of the appliance. Now also available are ranges with “dual fuel” that lets chefs mix gas and electric heat sources; and electric convection ovens that rely on radiant heating action to cook up twice as fast as conventional ovens while a combination oven combines three modes of cooking - steam, hot air, and a combination of both to efficiently steam, poach, roast, broil, bake and re-thermalise.

Also available are induction ovens that save precious minutes by bringing water to a boil faster than gas or electric cooktops, as well as saving on clean-up time because spills won’t cook onto the stovetop.