While fridges and freezers play important roles in your kitchen, you can boost your chilled capabilities by putting in a blast chiller. How do these appliances work and what are the benefits of using one?
What Is a Blast Chiller?
Blast chillers are freezers with specialised features. Like standard freezers, they freeze food. However, they work much more quickly than the average freezer. These machines blast intense levels of cold air onto food. They can be set up to work on hot, warm or cold dishes.
In all cases, they turn food from fresh to frozen in a fraction of the time it would take a freezer to do the same job. Depending on the chiller you choose, you can also sometimes use the chiller to simply cool down hot food rather than freeze it if you need to.
Why Use a Blast Chiller?
Blast chillers have certain hygiene benefits that you might not get from a standard fridge or freezer. When you cool down or freeze food, you run the risk of bacteria appearing on the food. This could make your customers ill.
If you cool or freeze food in a blast chiller, then the temperature of the food reduces a lot more quickly. The food won't sit around at a bacteria-attracting temperature for long at all. This reduces the chances that you'll run into health and safety problems with foodborne germs.
Plus, blast chilling food gives you a better quality end product than regular freezing. If you freeze a dish, then ice crystals will develop on and around it as it cools down. Once the food defrosts, these crystals can make the food watery and less appetising. A dish that tastes fantastic when it was freshly cooked may lose some of its great taste after it has been frozen.
When you use a blast chiller, the freezing process is accelerated. Anything you freeze will attract fewer ice crystals; the crystals themselves will also be a lot smaller. They won't have such negative effects on the look and taste of the food.
Given that you can maintain higher quality standards, you can also use a blast chiller to help you batch cook. You can prepare parts of dishes or even complete ones in advance and in bulk. Once they are blast chilled, you can store them in a regular freezer.
To learn more about the advantages of using a blast chiller and to see available models, contact a commercial refrigeration equipment ​supplier.
