Cooking on the Cutting Edge

From blast chilling and induction to scaled-down food processing equipment to IT programs that aggregate orders and manage inventory, operations are taking advantage of the most advanced technology the industry has to offer.

By Toby Weber, Associate Editor -- Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, 9/1/2005

The basic methods of cooking have been around for thousands of years. Cooking with a rotisserie is a lot like putting food on a stick and holding it over a flame. A deck oven with a stone cooking surface isn’t that different a technique than placing meat on a hot rock. It is all, as they say, just fire in a box.

This is not to say, however, that new technologies or improvements to existing ones have no place or use in today’s foodservice industry. In fact, new technologies promise to save their users time, labor and energy, among the many benefits they offer.

Of course, not every advancement makes sense for every operation. So most operators tend to add individual pieces of cutting-edge equipment rather than making widespread changes to their kitchens.

An Education for, and in the Future
In a way, Chicago’s Kendall College proves this rule. Celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, Kendall College has a 20-year-old School of Culinary Arts that works with several manufacturers in the testing of advanced equipment.

Instead of placing all of the newer pieces in one location, Kendall College distributes them throughout the school’s cooking areas. Spreading this equipment out, says Chef Christopher Koetke, dean of the School of Culinary Arts, provides the student body with a more complete understanding of these pieces.

“To put all the advanced equipment in one kitchen would be a mistake,” he says. “We want these students to live it, not just experience it once and move on.” And by placing this equipment throughout the school’s kitchen, students work with and around these items nearly every time they cook.

That being said, some kitchens at Kendall house more pieces of advanced equipment than others.

In January, the school moved from its former location in Evanston, Ill., to a new facility on Chicago’s near-north side. The $20 million building houses the college’s hospitality and culinary schools and includes a total of 16 kitchens. These kitchens reflect the types of setups students will likely encounter after graduation. The setups include a cafeteria kitchen used to feed students and faculty, a fine-dining kitchen that serves as the school’s white-tablecloth restaurant, a pastry kitchen, a chocolate and sugar kitchen, and a meat kitchen.

One kitchen at Kendall that contains several pieces of advanced equipment is the school’s pastry classroom. As one would expect, this kitchen houses pieces such as floor and countertop mixers, dough cutters and ovens. However, Kendall has taken the unique step of fitting every workstation with an induction cooktop. In all, the school has approximately 100 induction cookers, Koetke says.

While he cautions that induction requires significantly more power than their lower-tech counterparts, the precise temperature controls they provide make them well suited for producing the temperature-sensitive sauces, glazes and the like that are part and parcel to making pastries.

“Electric is far less sensitive than induction and with gas, it’s all visual,” Koetke notes. “It’s very interesting to want something to reach 150°F. and to have the ability to it hold there.”

Induction cookers are not the only pieces of high-tech equipment in Kendall’s pastry kitchen. A large piece of equipment that easily takes up more floor space than a six-burner range, the automatic dough roller offers labor and time savings by assisting in high-volume preparation. While such a piece is overkill for most operations, hospitals, hotels and other large foodservices may find it fits their needs.

The meat kitchen, where students learn how to make sausage and experiment with different ways to prepare various meats, also houses many of the school’s more forward-looking pieces of equipment.

One of the most impressive items in this kitchen is the meat smoker that, as Koetke describes it, “does everything.” For example, the piece burns wood chips loaded into a chute on the front, sprays liquid smoke, injects both dry heat and humidity and cold-showers product after it is cooked. The smoker also records time and temperature information on a physical chart for HACCP purposes, and it can be controlled by low-tech knobs or electronic controls.

Also in the meat room is an automatic meat-patty maker. About the size of a large electric slicer, the piece produces about 1,800 patties per hour. Staff operate this simply by loading ground meat into the holding bin. The advantages of such an item are clear, Koetke says. While preparing for a large event, the patty maker can save the operator many man-hours by eliminating the need for kitchen staff to make patties by hand. It also easily allows operations to prep and store “signature” burgers with ingredients (blue cheese or mush-rooms, for instance) mixed into the meat.

According to Koetke, both the smoker and the patty maker are scaled-down versions of pieces of equipment that are standard in the meat processing industry. This, he says, is no coincidence. Sectors of the food industry outside of foodservice are fertile ground for finding new equipment and technologies applicable to foodservice.

“There are all kinds of machines, processes and ingredients that exist in other facets of the food industry that foodservice doesn’t know about,” he says. “When you start to put the two pools of information together, it’s amazing the stuff you can do. We’ve looked to the industry — processing, manufacturing — to see what it has that we should be thinking about.”

An Induction into High-Tech
Cook-chill technology can no longer realistically be called “cutting edge,” but the way in which Emory Healthcare in Atlanta utilizes its system is more forward-looking than most operations. Emory Healthcare consists of three main locations, all in Atlanta: Emory University Hospital, Emory Crawford Long Hospital and the Wesley Wood Center, which serves senior citizens with an acute-care hospital, nursing home and senior housing.

Up until three years ago, each location handled much of its own production work for high-volume menu items. In 2002, however, Emory Healthcare completed a renovation of its foodservice facilities. Included in that renovation was a large cook-chill system at Emory University Hospital, and the level to which Emory Healthcare utilizes this system is truly impressive.

According to Lynne Ometer, director of food and nutrition services for Emory Hospitals, the operation produces about 70 different menu items with the equipment, some in extremely large volumes. For example, each month the system produces 400 gallons of spaghetti sauce, 1,400 gallons of grits and 200 gallons of chicken Florentine soup.

The system consists of a quartet of 100-gallon kettles, as well as a pair of large chilling tanks. Food production with the system is fairly standard, though it features a few twists. Once cooked in the kettles, the food product is pumped through a hose into bags that are then vacuum-sealed, clipped and labeled.

The bags are then placed on a conveyor belt, which transports them about 15 feet to a chute that leads to the chill tanks, which are filled with ice water.

The tanks themselves, however, do more than just chill product. They also have the ability to cook food. In addition to being filled with cold water, they can also heat water. Emory uses this ability to cook a variety of items, typically meats. A single tank can cook up to 700 pounds of meat at a time.

Of course, transferring food produced in the main hospital’s cook-chill system to the two other hospitals that make up the Emory system is a task in and of itself. To accomplish this, the operator relies, naturally, on two refrigerated trucks equipped with computer systems that can record time and temperature information. Emory staff can download the data from the trucks to the operation’s main computer system and use this information for HACCP compliance reports and studies.

Also, as part of the renovation the hospital added what is best described as a front-of-the-house cook-to-order station with induction burners offering items such as omelets and stir-fry.

In the coming months, Emory plans to expand the station’s afternoon and evening offerings to include a pasta bar by joining this station’s capabilities with the hospital’s cook-chill system. Staff will cook high volumes of pasta in the operation’s back-of-the-house pasta cooker and then chill it in individual-sized portions. When a customer places a pasta order, staff will use a hot water bath to reheat the noodles. They will then sauté a protein on an induction cooker. When both are done, staff will add a sauce the customer chooses when ordering.

According to Ometer, the display nature of the station makes it one of the most popular in the operation. This station, she notes, would not have been possible with more traditional pieces of equipment. The area in which it is located does not have the utility connections to operate a gas range, nor the hood system necessary to operate a gas or electric range top.

Doing IT Right
Technology, of course, is affecting foodservice operations in areas other than equipment. Computer/IT systems are also revolutionizing the way foodservices operate.

Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center is implementing new systems that should change everything from the way it stores goods, to how customers order food, to the monitoring of staff cleanliness.

The system with the most obvious benefit is the hospital’s new handwashing tool, which will be fully operational by the beginning of next year.

Upon entering the kitchen, foodservice employees will have to go to a sink with a keypad and enter their ID number. The sink will then dispense a short burst of water and then pause for the amount of time staffers are expected to scrub their hands. Rinse water is then dispensed, after which employees wave their hands in front of a monitor to register that they have completed the process. All the operation’s handwashing data is recorded and sent to a monitoring center run by the system vendor, which stores the data and provides periodic reports to the operator.

According to Eric Eisenberg, executive chef at Swedish Medical Center, the benefits of such a system are clear: increased food safety and the ability to provide a record of staffs’ handwashing practices to health inspectors.

In addition, promoting good hand hygiene is a major initiative at the hospital, Eisenberg says, so while these units are slated to be used only in foodservice operations, it is foreseeable that they will be installed in other areas of the hospital.

Handwashing tracking is just one system Swedish is installing. The most ambitious of these systems is an inventory and order management tool that is scheduled to go live this October and will connect all of the hospital’s retail and patient foodservice needs.

Each day, these locations receive their food supplies for the day from a central storeroom, as well as supplies from other storerooms. Under the hospital’s current IT system, all food shipments to the separate production and serving facilities are tracked manually, and anyone can access the storage rooms. This raises obvious problems.

“Right now we’re not exactly sure of how much is going in or out,” Eisenberg says. “We have a general order that is placed each day, but we have no control over someone going in on their own and grabbing a little extra of this or that.”

The new system will allow staff to place food shipment orders electronically, and only managers will have access to storerooms, giving the hospital greater inventory control and a more complete picture of its food costs.

The system will also improve patient service. Swedish Medical Center handles patient meals using a room service-style system, with patients placing their orders through a call center. Under the current system, orders are printed up on tickets that are then sent to the cooklines in the order in which they were placed.

This method, however, contains some internal conflicts. Obviously, the hospital prefers to make multiple deliveries to the same area at the same time, but accomplishing this without having food sit for long periods of time depends wholly on when patients place their orders.

The new system, however, will batch the orders so that meals going to the same area are prepared at roughly the same time. These orders will then be provided to kitchen staff on newly installed computer screens.

One reason why Swedish has invested in IT and not in more physical assets, such as redesigned kitchens, is purely practical. In the coming years, Swedish Medical Center plans to build a new facility that will house, among other departments, much of its foodservice operations. Renovating its kitchen now, therefore, would be a poor use of resources.

But there is a bigger-picture reason for these investments, one that links them beyond their common nature as IT/computer based, Eisenberg says.

“The equipment that we use, their cooking methods have been used as long as people have worked with food. That stuff has not changed a lot. But the computer and IT tools are the kinds of things that free us up to focus on our overall quality and customer and patient satisfaction.”

That, really, is the key to the adoption of all technology advances in foodservice. Ultimately, operations invest in high-tech equipment or systems not because they are new or different, but for the same reason they invest in anything: The money spent will have a bigger payoff in the long run, either through making work easier or more efficient.