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The  IRINOX LCC 202-180 blast chiller/shock freezer is finally up and running. It must have been one of the most challenging projects so far, for so many reasons. First the funding got almost cut and with  a strategic smart move I could secure the funding. (We will see how my smart move will haunt me in future capital projects) Then the challenges excavating the floor since it is a sunk in model. Riggers, length of piping for the remote condenser, electrical, a probe that needed to be replaced, a false wiring, which was the electricians fault. But lastly everything is completed. The only thing left to do is the connection to the PC.

So why IRINOX? Years back, I think it was in 2005, RATIONAL was doing a demo in our Kitchen on the SCC’s. When the issue of chilling the food quickly after a cooking cycle for the BQTing system, in order stop the cooking and to retain as much juices as possible, the IRINOX brand was brought up. IRINOX back then modified some of their units to fit the SCC roll-in  racks. Over these years I got to know the IRINOX chillers, the former VP as well as the Corporate Chef. Who would have thought it would take us a few more years to actually get a unit into our kitchen? With 3 SCC 202, and a forth one in the pipeline, and two more smaller combi ovens, we outgrew our 6 sheet pan/ 12 GN pan blast chiller. It was not optional to get  a larger and higher performing unit. The decision to go the extra step, including the pains that came with it,  of a sunk in unit was to add flexibility and the ability to use regular speed racks as well. The optional UV lights, sous vide probe, printer and remote PC connection were in our case as you can already guess, more of a must have rather being optional.

Why a blast chiller to begin with? There are really three reasons why I think every professional kitchen now matter the size should have a blast chiller.

• First and foremost: Food safety. We all go regularly to the Food safety manager classes and learn how important it is to chill the food as quickly as possible through the temperature danger zone. In essence from 140F to 70F within 2 hours and from 70F to 40F within 4 hours. Then we learn ways to do do that. Shallow pans in the refrigerator, though without raising the temperature in the cooler; ice paddles/sticks and running cold water, and a few other possibilities. All I can say is: ” cute”. Anybody ever made 100 gallons of marinara or chili, put them in shallow pans and let them cool in a walk-in cooler? It does not work, at least we couldn’t figure it out how. First we would need more hotel pans than we have in the entire property. Second we needed a whole walk-in cooler designated for chili, marinara and stock cooling, since the cooler could not maintain the temperature below 40F for all other foods stored in that walk in. To chill in the freezer is even worse, all the condensation causing the coils to freeze up and taxing all equipment even more. Examining the ice paddle solution with a batch of 100gallons would look similar to 20 each 5 gallon Cambro buckets with 20 ice paddles in it. All the buckets in prep sinks. Our prep sinks can take either 2 or 4 buckets each. 24 buckets can find a spot in the prep sinks, throughout all kitchens. No more sinks would be available to do any other prep and any additional cooling needs we would have to use the ware washing three compartment sinks. Not the most sanitary solution either. Besides wasting a lot of water, which we are short of anyway, all sinks are being used, or are not even enough for all the cooling we need to do. Any batch would be spread over many sinks and  hard to prevent possible cross contamination. So in essence neither of these solutions we learn will work, except maybe one, which is using ice as part of the preparation, which could work with a few preparations though not with all. I cant see using ice as an ingredient at the end of a preparation, where we reduce the inital amount of water during the cooking and add it in the end order to cool down, when making stocks, demi, chili or marinara. Could you? If you do please enlighten me. So in other words “cute” solutions wont ensure the safe cooling of food, blast chillers do.

• Second: Food quality. We all have preparations that require the chilling or even freezing thereafter. And yes, I do not want to hear that some of us make everything fresh and wont chill the food. If you do not chill foods in cases where you do not immediately serve the food after cooking, please let me know now. I wont eat at your place. See reason one. On a recent visit to a restaurant the chef claimed heir new rotisserie would outperform my RATIONAL in cooking the hogs, which did not believe to be quite honest. The chicken is cooked during lunch service, and as we learned later, left on the counter to rest for dinner service. The reason is to ensure the meat to remain moist and the skin crisp. The result was doubtful. If you would have served me a rotisserie chicken out of a combi oven I would not have noticed a difference. The only thing we did notice was that both my wife and I sick like dogs, and trust me since the days of my military service, my stomach can take quite some abuse. A blast chiller could have cooled the food quickly and safely, chicken retained the same amount of moisture. In the end chicken still has to be heated up again anyway, either way. To back up my claim with hard facts and data. One of the first items we blast chilled was halibut, about 80 portions. The chill cycle down to 37F was 32 minutes. And comparing the weight loss to the few pieces we cooled in a refrigerator was 14% less weight loss In in other words: 14% juicier fish when cooled in the blast chiller.With our BQT system, where we cook food to the desired doneness, we chill the food as quick as possible, the reason for the blast chiller, to retain as many of the juices and then plate up. We retherm right before we serve the plates, approximately 8 minutes per rack. A plate rack can carry 84 or 100 plates. Saucing and garnish, and in some cases proteins that don retherm well are put last on the plates.  And if the grand entrance of the newly weds is an hour and a half late, no food has been sitting in a hot box for that long,  since we start start to retherm later after serving the first course, and we just know to happen when we serve the first course – after the grand entrance.  Other thoughts on quality are the a quick freeze is resulting in small ice crystals rather large ones, which are sharp and puncture the cells, causing cell fluids to run out. In other words it will be dry after cooking. And yes we know quality kitchens do not freeze food. I always wonder why everybody has a freezer than. I admit we freeze foods, we freeze our ice cream, not sure how others do, but we do. Or ever had order of product coming in for a large group and it got canceled, no chance of returning the items? We also freeze those items to serve later in the cafeteria. Back to ice cream. Since the freezing process is so fast freezing the ice cream in the shock freezing mode after churning creates a much smoother ice cream  or gelato. Simply amazing. Another reason to freeze is ,when food is the lowest price it tends to be also the highest quality, because they are mot likely in season. Freezing allows us to prepare those foods at their peak for later use. Berry coulis is the first to come to my mind.

• Third: Energy and cost efficiency. I touched energy in reason one. A blast chiller is built to blast chill. It uses more energy during a chilling cycle, but in the long run we use less energy in our coolers if we fill them with cold food rather with warm food. It also prolongs the life cycles of the storage coolers, their condensers, coils and operators,  as they “work less hard”, and go into less defrost cycles like they do when filled with warm or hot foods. Defrost cycles performed too often, one or two times a day, also cause food to spoil quicker as a cooler is busy heating the coils to remove any ice build up.And while to coils defrost, and not cool, the temperatures in foods increase. Even in the best insulated coolers.

Concluding, all kitchens should at least have a blast chillers. A shock freezer is even better and more versatile. I understand the hesitation about the “new things”; over hundred years ago, cars were a new concept too, not to mention airplanes. Lets get over it. The inital high purchase price is well worth it compared to the envery savings, quality of food and the safety of the food.

Yesterday Kirss Harvy from Advanced Gourmet the US distributor of PacoJet held a demo class on this amazing machine here in LA at the E. Guittard Chocolate Studio. It was info packed three plus hours with endless ideas and applications. As I am still sorting my notes and thoughts for me the biggest two take aways are. First I always felt we needed to buy one and now I know why. Secondly Kriss said something that stuck in my mind. It was something along the line that Kriss as a pastry chef approaches his desserts like as savory chef, he wants to build it and plate it as if it was a savory dish. It does make sence and for me as a chef who finds himself since years without a pastry chef or even pastry department made me think if these words would bring any of my cooks who end up plating desserts closer to the patisserie. That the if we saw and approached the dessert cuisine the same way as we approch the savory side, how could that impact our final product.

As for the Pacojet Kriss showed us much more that ice cream that can be produced. From frozen dusts/snows, a freshly made pistachio puree that as simply amazing in taste, texture and color, nougats and of course ice cream the applications seem to be endless. But what makes the PacoJet so different than other ice cream machines? Well firt of all it is not an ice cream machine or batch freezer. As a matter of fact the PacoJet is nothing else than a blade mounted on a drill. The matter must be frozen beforehand in the designated beakers before the PacoJet can do its magic. What it basically does it to “drill” down the blade at 2000rpm downwards into the frozen matter, thus creating the smoothest ice cream. Even lobster bodies frozen together with a lobster bisque could me churned into a smooth homogeneous mass.

As I said applications are endless the only thing I need to be aware of is the amount of beakers we will need. I can see us spending more money on beakers than the actual PacoJet, which means being even more creative than we were in getting a new vacuum chamber machine, which I have yet to report about.

I forgot my camera in the car and the class was too interesting to leave even for a minute or two. I will try to get a few from those attendees which did not forget.

In these troubling times we tend to use secondary cuts even more. Last week we had a fund raiser group for lunch, thier budget was relatively decent though a beef option was requested and we had done already a braised short rib the prior year. This yeas we chose a flank steak cooked sous vide. A couple of weeks ago we had a tasting where we cooked the herb oil marinated flanks at 55C for 18hours in the circulator, seared them before serving. The client enjoyed the tender flanks so much it was a “go”.  Once the event came closer the size of the event outgrew our circulator capacity and we had no other choice than to cook them in the RATIONAL combi ovens. In various forums there have been concerns that combi ovens could not keep the temperature constant enough to cook sous vide. Left with no other choice we put it to the test again. This time with temperature loggers planted all over. When we cook sous vide in our combi ovens we usually place the bags in hotels pans filled with water to ensure a more constant cooking environment.

First we cleaned the 4C cold meat and placed it immediately into the vacuum bag. Into one bag we placed also a Temp1000P submersible probe, at which point the first set of data recording started. The bag were placed back into a freezer for a few minutes cool down quicker. Once below 2-3C we added the oil-herb mixture and sealed the bags. Since we were cooking little over 160lbs and only one vacuum sealer we placed the sealed bags back into the freezer. Into one of the bags we inserted a hypodermic probe and attached an Extech EA15 logger. The logging started right before the bags went into the freezer the second time.

In the mean while we had the combi oven heating up to 60C, full steam, and added the water filled the 4″ GN hotel pans. By the time the water in the pans reached 60C the meat went down to 1,at which point added the vacuum bags. In our case two 12×18″ bags per pan. Each bag had 3 flanks. A 4″ hotel pan has an approximate volume of 10 liters. The two bags have a volume of 3 liters. We want to make sure not to overfill each pan to ensure a constant cooking.

By the time the 20 pans were filled the water temperature of each pan fell to approximately 54C, when the cooking cycle started. We reduced the temperature to 57C, to achieve a internal temperature of the meat between 55C-56C. The two loggers were in different pans and locations of the oven to ensure a better reading. In the first 50 minutes the internal temperature of the meat went from 1C to 50C incerasing almost 1 degree per minute. It took another 2.5 hours to reach 55C. At least from a food afety stand point we were safe and reached 55C/131F within 4 hours. We continued to cooking cycle for another 18hours, or a total cooking time of 22 hours.

Analyzing the resulting four temperature logs, one from the Temp1000P, one from the EA15, and the two of the RATIONAL oven itself, where one is the actual cabin temperature the other one the temperature of the water bath where we placed the C/T probe we see that: The temperature variation of the combi oven itself can vary +/- 5C because of the low heat steam generated.  For the most time the cabin temperature was +/- 2C within the 57C, the water bath temp was 1-2C below the 57C, so at any time it was at or over 55C, the both temp loggers recorded the meat anywhere between 55.2C and 55.9C, for the last couple hours the temperature variance was eve smaller between 55.3C and 55.4C.

Conclusion, batch cooking sous vide in a water bath is doable and very close to the preciseness of the cirulator when the bags are placed into a water bath. As we continue to cook sous vide in the Rationals we will keep more log and share our findings. One thought we had during the proces was that dry heat is more constant in the combi ovens than steam heat.  Since we place the bags already into water baths would we achieve a more constant heating curve if we cooked in dry heat. We will certainly find out.

To finish the flanks itself we took them out of the bags, seared them ala plancha and placed them on racks back into the combioven Cooking program Roasts -> Overnight Roasts -> Skip Searing-> 55C/131F, until serving which was less than 30 minutes away.

If the flanks were cooked on a prior day we would have of course chilled them down immediately after the cooking cycle in the blast chiller.