For the past few months, while I’ve supported my mother through a sickness, I’ve been working as a prep chef in a busy commercial cafe in a coastal town. My main observation has been of how energy transfers within a commercial kitchen. It is one of those things that I’m sure no one else would find remotely interesting, but that fascinates me intensely. In a busy commercial kitchen, not a single joule is wasted. Everything is on just for long enough to deliver the desired result, and then it is shut off. A busy commercial kitchen seems to operate on a fine line between careful resource management and deft resources as the chef arranges a wide array of components in the last few seconds before the plating.
While I’ve been working here, I’ve been making a subtle note of the way that energy transfers. I’ve seen scrambled eggs cooked in 15 seconds – I’ve seen burgers assembled in 10. The whole kitchen is nothing but a stream of complex processes that flow together rather nicely to produce a predetermined range of dishes.
Of course, my specialisation, being the junior in the kitchen, is on the prep side of things. I’m the guy roasting off the bacon and mixing up the eggs, preparing the scone mix and making sure that we have just enough of each condiment to plate the meal successfully. It’s not a job with a huge amount of prestige, but it is challenging. So this article might just as well be titled “Things I learned working as a prep chef in a commercial kitchen”.
Here are some of the principles that allow commercial kitchens to get things done.
Use of prep
Certain elements of a meal are prepared in bulk as ‘prep’ and are then distributed across a range of dishes, forming a component to the food. This achieves a time efficiency that cannot be matched in a household kitchen.
Things that never made sense to me before – such as hollandaise sauce – make perfect sense within the context of the commercial cafe kitchen. I never got why people would spend 45 minutes assembling all the additional ingredients for an eggs benedict for a dish that would be eaten in 10. It just seemed like such a waste to me. But if you can prep a large quantity of hollandaise sauce and have it on hand and freshly made, without having to resort to prepped containers, then you can add that extra level to your dish and still turn it around within a few minutes.
Most restaurants do a huge amount of ‘prep’ work in advance of serving a meal. The split, in a highly effective cafe, might be 60/40 – 60% prep work to 40% actual cooking involved.
This is a key part of how they manage to turnaround seemingly very complex meals within the space of a few minutes.
A perfect example would be scrambled eggs. A chef might know he will sell 30 servings of scrambled eggs during breakfast. So the night before he will prep a large quantity of scrambled egg mixture – maybe 60 eggs’ worth. The task can be completed in 15 minutes. The eggs are then ready for the next morning – to apply a surge of heat to them, add some quickly buttered toast and crisped bacon, and make it a meal. Generally if one were to prepare this from home, it would involve around 10-15 minutes’ cooking per meal.
This is how commercial kitchens manage to serve hundreds of complex meals in a day. The elements of cooking on a large scale don’t really change – just the vectors. The same basic components are the same, and it often only takes a few extra minutes to prepare a meal for 10 than for 1.
Investments in machinery
The higher volume of meals, dinners and dishes means that the kitchen must invest in relevant machinery to make the process of preparing and cleaning plates a more efficient one. Often, these machines come along with a resulting efficiency saving, which I think often translates to a more environmental outcome as well. The use of highly efficient dishwashers, for instance, can save considerably in time and resources used to clean plates and prepare them for reuse, without the need for washing or even drying. Efficient machinery tends to produces breakfasts and clean dishes at the lower overall costs and with less energy and resource use.
A capacity business
Like motels, commercial kitchens are a capacity business. This means that the business needs to receive enough foot traffic, occupancy, turnover and cashflow in order to justify paying its staff and keeping its doors open. Some days will be heavy, other days will be light. Which is often why chefs use their downtime during the light periods to ‘prep’ meal elements for later times in the week.
Part of the reasons that cafes in busy holiday locations have been booming lately is because of the economic boom in New Zealand. When times inevitably slow down, no doubt the demand for cafes will dissipate and many will shut their doors, as discretionary income disappears from coastal locations.
Commercial kitchens achieve greater efficiencies
Chefs are usually very experienced at dealing with waste. Because they are often also the owners of the business, it is in their incentives to minimise waste and cost. They also set up prescriptive disincentives to prevent staff from causing losses from waste, because it is in their interest to do so.
In short – the key to a successful commercial kitchen is organisation. Planning, time management, and systems. As well as rolling with the punches.
A human system
It is a human system, however, and this means that it is prone to inevitable slippages, particularly during times of high pressure and high stress. During these times, people (including customers) can become downright scary.
The huge amount of intensity and rapid movement involved in putting together a rapid succession of complex dishes creates an emotional absorption that can lead to conflict. As they say, tempers flare in the kitchen.
But this, again, is a function of time management and preparation, as well as a degree of emotional resilience.
It makes me wonder whether it would be possible to construct a kitchen with no chef work, and almost 100% prep work. If that were indeed possible, what impact would that have on the energy intensity of the kitchen, let alone the emotions that flow from it?
How do these factors contribute to environmental outcomes?
Businesses driven by sheer practical necessity and the motive to find profit wherever they can, tend to go a long way towards discovering the processes that are the most efficient.
There are some grey areas, however. Things that are a bit marginal in terms of cost saving versus time consumption tend not to be done. Therefore a reasonably large amount of food that could be composted is simply chucked into a rubbish bag. This is particularly the case if the business receives favourable commercial waste collection rates. If the penalty for throwing out waste were greater, no doubt kitchens would find ways to operate more efficiently and minimise waste further.
My conclusion is that by the pressure of being in business, commercial kitchens themselves achieve outcomes that are generally more environmentally efficient than if each of the meals were prepared at home individually. (This excludes travel to the cafe, of course, if that were ever calculable.) The pressure to maintain profitability in a competitive market means that kitchens are required to find the most energy efficient way of supplying their meals.
This leads me to the outrageous conclusion that despite their reputation to the contrary, businesses actually sometimes contribute to environmental outcomes.
