The essential appliances that no restaurant can do without are professional refrigerated cabinets, an indispensable support in the kitchen for properly storing fresh, raw, or cooked foods, ensuring their quality, safety, and hygiene.
Proper storage is essential to prevent the proliferation of bacteria that can cause food poisoning. Moreover, it guarantees the integrity of the nutritional properties of the food and ensures the goodness and freshness of the product—qualities that are certainly sought after by all customers.
Food Preservation: Different Characteristics of Foods
Are we planning to open a restaurant? Great, let’s forget our home habits and start studying how to properly store food in professional refrigerated cabinets and freezers.
First and foremost, we must attend the legally required HACCP course, which lists all the regulations related to the safety and hygiene of food products intended for sale and public consumption.
Additionally, if we choose to invest in a profitable business like the restaurant industry, we must necessarily focus on numerous organizational and logistical aspects, one of which is the quantity of food and ingredients we need to serve our customers daily and in the best way possible. This means having food supplies available, properly stored, with particular attention to fresh products, which tend to spoil quickly.
It is undeniable that food stored at the right temperature is not only healthier and more genuine but also lasts longer, avoiding food waste. In this regard, it is worth considering the difference between raw and cooked food.
Raw and cooked food have different shelf lives. The former tends to spoil more quickly than the latter and develops bacteria more rapidly.
Foods like raw meat and fish, if stored in professional refrigeration cabinets, should be consumed as quickly as possible, preferably on the same day, while cooking eliminates a good portion of bacteria and slows the proliferation of others. Additionally, temperatures vary depending on the type of product. In general, we know that:
- Raw and cooked foods cannot be stored in the same place.
- Cold cuts, cheeses, milk, and eggs, for example, should be stored at a temperature not exceeding 5°C.
- Raw meat and fish should not exceed 2°C.
- Frozen products should be stored at no more than -18°C.
Therefore, a restaurant must necessarily be equipped with multiple professional refrigerators, with specific cooling and storage capacities.
How to Properly Store Food in Professional Refrigerated Cabinets
Professional refrigeration appliances must meet certain requirements to preserve the organoleptic properties of fresh, chilled, frozen, and deep-frozen foods.
Refrigeration cabinets have different cooling capacities and shelves with specific temperatures, where various products can be placed according to their category.
Refrigerators are essential for storing raw or cooked food that must be consumed quickly, while freezers are specific for storing food for longer periods.
Another indispensable appliance for most restaurants is the blast chiller, which quickly lowers the temperature of food and preserves it for a long time, resulting in a frozen product.
To maintain the quality of the food, it is essential to avoid overloading the refrigerators and placing hot food inside, and to close them correctly and quickly after use.
Overloading refrigeration cabinets can impede the proper circulation of air, creating hot spots that encourage the proliferation of bacteria and accelerate food spoilage.
For this reason, it is important to equip your establishment with a certain number of refrigerators and freezers, depending on the needs of food storage in refrigerated environments. Health regulations require that each professional refrigerated compartment can contain only one type of food (meat, fish, vegetables, cooked foods, etc.).
COOK-IN Professional Refrigerators
As we have explained so far, maintaining the cold chain is crucial for food preservation. If we purchase fresh products intended for immediate consumption, we can store them in a refrigerator, but if they need to be stored for a long time, we must necessarily have a freezer and a blast chiller that allows us to freeze the food as quickly as possible.
All Cook-in professional refrigeration equipment meets the targeted needs of restaurateurs, offering numerous models that all share excellent technology for perfect preservation:
- Modular refrigeration cabinets with automatic defrosting, adjustable stainless steel feet, self-closing reversible doors, and locks.
- Positive stainless steel freezer cabinet with ventilated evaporator and automatic defrosting.
- Negative static cabinet for storing fresh ice cream and frozen foods.
- Static refrigeration cabinets for fresh fish and all seafood, with components treated with anticorrosion treatment (cataphoresis).
- Refrigeration cabinets for churned ice cream with the option to insert ice cream tubs.
- Curing cabinets for cured meats that allow for drying and curing with a heat pump system.
- Proofing cabinets for pastry with stainless steel structure suitable for containing EN 60×40 cm and/or EN 60×80 cm trays.
- Refrigerators for medical and pharmaceutical use.
- Modular refrigerated tables.
- Ventilated refrigeration cabinets.
The Cook-IN catalog (you can consult the complete list here) offers a wide range of models selected from the best quality on the market, guaranteeing perfect product preservation.
The different models are designed with advanced technologies to be long-lasting and ensure high performance, even in terms of energy savings.
To request advice on the models best suited to your specific needs, contact Cook-In, a leader in the sale of professional equipment and machinery for bars, restaurants, and large hotels. Contact us for a consultation.
