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Shrinking Commercial Kitchen Space Drives Appliance Product Innovation

For decades now, kitchen appliance trends have begun in commercial kitchens, leaving amateur and residential chefs to covet the latest and most innovative cooking gear.

Commercial kitchens are getting smaller. Around the world, food businesses are increasing profitability by dedicating more space to front-of-house and reducing overall back-of-house space. Furthermore, new food business concepts, such as pop-up restaurants and food trucks, have limited space, and are demanding smaller, more multi-functional appliances.

Smaller kitchen trends are dramatically influencing commercial as well as residential kitchen appliance product design.

Here are three space-saving products that were must-haves in commercial kitchens last year, and we expect to see them rolled out in high-end residential kitchens in 2015.

The combi oven

Loved by chefs for its ability to cook, steam and hold food, now the combi oven is smaller than ever before. To make a transition into residential settings, a combi oven can be stacked on top of a traditional or convection oven and uses either dry heat or steam to quickly cook food.

Now with easy-to clean glass and stainless steel surfaces, plus long service life and low energy consumption, we expect to increasingly see combi ovens in high-end residential kitchens.

Speedcook oven

Found for years in commercial kitchens, today speedcook ovens are helping busy families speed up cooking times without sacrificing any home cooked flavor.

Smaller in size and faster in cooking speed than a conventional oven, a speedcook oven combines convection, microwave, and, in most cases, a grill element. In fact, new speedcook ovens offer cooking times that are two to four times faster than what you’d see in ordinary ovens.

Most of these new residential speedcook ovens come with pre-set roasting and baking programs (for example a baking cycle might be 90% convection and 10% microwave) that yield great results at reduced times.

High BTU burners

A BTU (British thermal unit) measures the heating power generated by gas cooktops and ovens. In technical terms, a BTU is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. The higher the BTU capacity, the hotter the range can get; the hotter the range, typically the shorter the cooking times.

As both professional and amateur chefs know, heat control is a critical element of cooking food properly. In fact, most chefs consider the BTU rating to be the most important feature of the range.

While most residential burners max out at 12,000 BTUs, and a few offer 15,000 or 18,000, the new BlueStar Platinum series provides 25,000 BTUs of power to residential ranges.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ross McAllister .