Each cuisine requires specific kitchen equipment because different cooking styles, techniques, and ingredient preparations are fundamental to the authentic creation of dishes within that cuisine.
In the culinary world, each cuisine’s authenticity hinges on specific tools and practices. For Italian fare, pasta machines and pizza ovens are indispensable for freshness and taste, while Asian cuisines rely on woks and rice cookers for their signature dishes. Mexican kitchens demand tortilla presses for their staple dishes, and commercial grills are central to American classics. In contrast, French cooking, known for its finesse, requires sophisticated equipment like cast iron Dutch ovens.
As kitchens aim for efficiency, choosing the right equipment, understanding the interplay between equipment, cuisine type, and volume is crucial. Balancing these with budget constraints and available space guides restaurateurs to craft menus that resonate with their brand while ensuring quality and consistency.
Why is It Important to Have Specific Equipment for Different Types of Food?
Having specific equipment for different types of food is important because food types require different cooking techniques, appliances, and cookware to present the best results. Your business type is also a decisive factor in the most necessary commercial kitchen equipment, such as bakery display cases for bakeries or pizza prep tables for pizzerias.
Running a commercial kitchen in a restaurant, café, bakery, or hotel means you must cook a high volume of meals daily on a scheduled basis and ensure taste and texture consistency for every plate you prepare. Equipping your kitchen with the right commercial kitchen equipment and tools according to your menus offers efficiency and practicality to help you catch up with the orders, even in thousands, and guarantees consistent taste, appearance, and texture.
Cuisine types are of prime importance in furnishing your commercial kitchen since they directly influence your ingredients, cooking techniques, and presentation. So, we have created a list of the commercial kitchen equipment needed for different cuisine types for an efficient workflow and better tastes and appearance that will also increase the number of your customers and profitability.
Essentials for Italian Cuisine
Italian cuisine and naturally the restaurants that serve Italian foods and desserts have always been popular in the United States and all other parts of the world with delicious foods and desserts like pasta, pizza, or focaccia, along with desserts like gelato and tiramisu.
Italian cuisine prioritizes freshness, requiring you to make all these in your establishment just before cooking and serving. To serve the best pizzas or pasta in a highly competitive Italian food sector, you have to serve tasty dishes and desserts, which necessitates suitable cooking tools that directly affect the texture and taste of your recipes.
What Unique Equipment do Italian Restaurants Need?
You need the right equipment to ensure freshness and consistent taste and texture for the Italian recipes. Here we present three most needed commercial kitchen equipment for an Italian cuisine restaurant:
- Commercial Pasta Tools: Freshly made pasta is always a hit that will create returning customers for more, bringing you a stable income to thrive in your business. So, in addition to the dough preparation equipment, you can get pasta mixers/extruders or pasta sheets to make your own delicious Italian Spaghetti, Linguini, Fusilli, Gnocchi, and Ravioli. You can find manual pasta machines for small-scale needs. However, if you have a high-traffic restaurant or run a large commercial kitchen for a hotel or catering service, automated pasta machines will be your reliable partner with their high production capacity.
- Commercial Pizza Equipment and Tools: Pizza is considered a symbol of Italian cuisine. So, when you want to start your Italian restaurant or a pizzeria, it is crucial for you to add Italian-type pizza machines to maintain the taste while facilitating the workflow. Wood-fired pizza ovens are the preferred type in Italian restaurants since they better maintain the heat with thick walls (mostly from bricks) and enhance the flavor with the burning wood.
Essentials for Asian Cuisine
The distinctiveness of Asian cuisine lies in its rich tapestry of spices and its bountiful use of seafood, shaping the culinary tools essential for its preparation. The intricate flavors of Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese dishes demand specialized equipment, from steamers for dumplings to robust woks for stir-fries, underscoring the uniqueness of each region’s cooking methods and ingredient handling. This uniqueness significantly informs the selection of equipment, ensuring each dish is as authentic in taste as it is in presentation.
Which Tools are Essential for a Variety of Asian Cuisines?
Asian cuisines are renowned for their rich flavors with high-quality spices, healthy ingredients, and seafood options. They employ different cooking techniques to ensure the taste of their recipes. Thus, it would be wise for you to add the following commercial kitchen equipment to your inventory to ensure the best results:
- Woks: This cookware is widely used in Asian recipes, particularly for stir-fries and noodles, because its unique shape with a narrower bottom and long side walls enables the cook to stir and toss the food easily without spilling it. Its round shape facilitates conducting heat, thereby lowering the cooking time. You can also get wok ranges that feature a special design to accommodate the awkward shape of the woks.
- Rice Cookers and Warmers: Rice is one of the primary ingredients of Asian cuisines and is used for sushi, fried rice, biryani, and many other recipes. Thus, you can shorten your food preparation by employing rice cookers and warmers that will quickly prepare large amounts of rice for you to use.
- Seafood Tools, Appliances, and Merchandisers: Seafoods are sensitive and expensive ingredients that must be stocked and exhibited in chilled or frozen storage. Seafood display cases are ideal for showcasing your seafood options, while fish file refrigerators can help you safely store these sensitive ingredients near your worktable. There are also sushi display cases that boast a chic and elegant design with transparent tops to store and serve the sushi in chilled, safe, and easy-to-browse units.
Essentials for Mexican Cuisine
Mexican cuisine is the refined result of the Mexican culture that values eating as an enjoyable part of life. They have great tastes, like tacos, quesadillas, and machaca. It’s difficult to maintain the texture and taste while cooking in large volumes in a much shorter time with regular equipment, so it would be best if you choose the right Mexican restaurant supplies according to your menu preferences.
What are The Must-Have Items in a Mexican Kitchen?
Tortilla presses, tortilla warmers, planchas, and churro makers are the must-have items in every Mexican restaurant to make and serve delectable Mexican and Spanish foods.
- Tortilla Equipment and Tools: Tortillas are extensively used in Mexican cuisine since they are crucial for tacos, burritos, or quesadillas. Therefore, you need tortilla presses, for which you only need to place the dough on the plate and lower the top press to create perfectly and consistently shaped tortillas in seconds. Additionally, you can get tortilla warmers to use the pre-cooked tortillas in your service.
- Planchas: In spite of being similar to griddles in appearance, planchas are specially designed commercial grills that reach super-hot temperature levels. While most commercial griddles produce up to 550°F (287.77°C), planchas can reach up to 800°F (426.66°C). Planchas concentrate the heat in the center, while griddles aim to distribute it evenly all through the surface.
- Churro Makers: Churros are the most popular type of Mexican dessert in the United States, and therefore, you will want to offer these in your establishment along with your tasty recipes. Churro makers simplify the process for you with their smart designs.
American Diner Classics: Setting Up
American cuisine cannot be defined as a uniform collection of techniques and ingredients but as a versatile diversity of various cuisines melted in the American cultural pot. There are remarkable differences between the different regions in terms of food. However, there is still a very clear perception of American cuisine, which is based on meat, fire, and oil, which necessitates several pieces of equipment in your American diner.
What Equipment is Key for an Authentic American Diner Experience?
Booths, a raised counter, and neon signs are the classic symbols that flash in the brain when most people hear the word American diner. But, there are also very common commercial kitchen equipment in the back of the house in addition to these:
- Commercial Charbroiler: This cooking equipment features an angled heat source (either burner or radiant source) and a grate over the flame so that you can cook burgers, ribs, steaks, and other types of meat with the iconic grill traces. They offer a quick cooking experience and provide a flavor-rich result.
- Hot Dog Steamers: Another iconic food in American cuisine is the hot dogs, which you can see in the hands of every child wandering in a funfair in a movie. The easiest way to cook and display these hot dogs is the steamers, which are specially designed to maintain the warmth of hot dogs while retaining their moisture.
- Commercial Fryer: Chicken wings, French fries, and dinner rolls are mouthwatering and delectable elements in American cuisine, and deep fryers help you make perfectly cooked and consistently crispy foods with their capacity to produce up to 400°F (204.44°C).
French Cuisine: The Art Of Cooking
French cuisine is the most prestigious and desired cuisine among the world kitchens. Evolving over centuries to create new techniques that have become the basics of every food service business, the Frech recipes are now based on appreciating the importance of quality overabundance, detail over speed, and presentation over hassle.
Which Equipment do French Restaurants Rely on?
For a cuisine that has introduced the “Mise En Place” concept, which can be translated as “Everything in its place” and refers to getting everything ready, from equipment to ingredients, before starting to cook, it is vital to have the most suitable equipment for the best result.
- Commercial Crepe Makers: To make the best French crepes, crepe maker pans will provide an excellent utensil with a non-stick surface and easy-to-flip design that will enable your chef to cook both sides.
- Cast Iron Dutch Oven: This cookware features thick walls generally made from cast iron or enameled porcelain, ideal for retaining heat. Furthermore, they come with a lid to maintain the heat. They are perfect for cooking, braising, or stewing foods slowly to ensure the quality and flavor that is crucial for French cuisine, and thus, they are also named French ovens.
- Commercial Sous Vide Circulators: Sous Vide is also a cooking technique developed by French chefs; therefore, when you want to cook tasty and healthy meals, you should get a sous vide circulator for your establishments, allowing you to slowly cook foods in vacuum-sealed packages.
Essentials for Indian Cuisine
Indian cuisine, celebrated for its aromatic blend of spices like cumin, turmeric, coriander, masala, ginger, cinnamon, black pepper, and red chili, also features iconic dishes such as biryani, dosa, pani puri, and bhatura. Each dish’s preparation calls for specific equipment to achieve its unique tastes and textures, from spice grinders for fresh masalas to tandoors for bread, highlighting the need for specialized equipment and tools in crafting these rich flavors.
How to Equip a Kitchen for The Rich Flavors of Indian Cooking?
Indian restaurant supplies are therefore designed to maximize the foods’ taste by improving the cooking experience with suitable designs as well as enriching the flavors through the best spices. You can see the most frequently needed commercial kitchen equipment for Indian restaurants:
- Commercial Spice Grinders: Spices are the foundation of almost all Indian recipes, and spice grinders are among the most necessary tools to add to your inventory. So, you can choose the best spices, buy them in bulk, and grind them in-house to use freshly ground spices that will upgrade the taste to the upper level.
- Commercial Frying Pans and Deep Fryers: Frying is among the most used techniques in Indian cuisine, and therefore, frying pans will be of great use to you. However, a commercial deep fryer can be a better choice when you need to accelerate the cooking, particularly when cooking in large amounts.
- Tandoor Ovens: These units feature a unique round shape and ceramic cooking surface, which reaches higher temperature levels with the heating source installed in the center, thereby decreasing the cooking duration. Furthermore, this Indian cooking equipment offers versatile use that enables you to cook flatbread, naan bread, roast chicken, or meat.
Essentials For Middle Eastern Flavors: A Blend Of Tradition and Innovation
Being the transition point between the East and the West as the primary road to the exchange of goods, the Middle East has also witnessed the emergence and development of a diverse and rich cuisine, which is now gaining much popularity in the West. Middle Eastern cuisine offers delicious shawarmas, falafel, hummus, baba ghanoush, and shish kabab, relying primarily on pulses, wheat, rice, fruits, and butter. Many of these dishes have creamy textures and require different cooking and preparation procedures and equipment.
What Equipment is Essential for Middle Eastern Culinary Practices?
Making all these delicious recipes requires you to invest in specific types of commercial kitchen equipment for Middle Eastern cuisine to achieve the best results that will help your business succeed.
- Shawarma or Doner Machine: Shawarma or doner is one of the most famous Middle Eastern dishes, and it can only be cooked with a shawarma machine. It rotates slowly before a heater, which is vertically placed, and as it is roasted enough, the cook cuts thin, juicy strips, which are served between pita bread or on rice pilaf.
- Commercial Blenders: Falafel, hummus, and muhammara are creamy dishes that are very common in Middle Eastern meals. Therefore, it would be wise to have an efficient and practical commercial blender to make consistently textured dishes for your customers’ delight and satisfaction.
- Ibrik: A nourishing and enjoyable meal with Middle Eastern dishes is still incomplete without Turkish coffee. It is prepared in an ibrik (or cezve as called in Turkey) by boiling the ground coffee. Additionally, it is served in smaller cups (called kahve fincanı (coffee cup)) with the ground coffee still inside, making it the only coffee served with ground coffee still inside.
Essentials For Mediterranean Cuisine
Stretching thousands of miles from the coast of Lebanon to the shores of Spain and Morrocco, the Mediterranean is not only the cradle of civilizations that shaped the history of the world but also hosted the development of a refined cuisine with the contributions from many different cultures, climates, and countries. Despite greatly varying throughout the region because of the vastness of this area, Mediterranean cuisine now relies primarily on grains, herbs, olive oil, spices, and dairy products such as yogurt and cheese. Additionally, Mediterranean cuisine favors healthy and tasty foods with slow-cooking marination-rich sauces, bringing the need for special equipment and tools.
What Kitchen Essentials Cater To The Diverse Mediterranean Palate?
You can customize your kitchen according to the requirements, but add these three commercial kitchen tools to create different Mediterranean recipes in your establishment.
- Commercial Citrus Juicers: These commercial juicers are perfect for preparing fresh fruit juice for your customers. However, you will also use them to make the dishes when you launch a commercial Mediterranean foodservice business. Mediterranean dishes frequently use fruit sours to enrich the taste and flavor of the dishes with lime or lemon juice; these units will allow you to squeeze a sufficient amount in seconds easily.
- Commercial Yogurt Makers: Yogurt is used in appetizers or to marinate meat and poultry to soften the fibers and infuse the flavors. Commercial yogurt makers are a better option to make your yogurt in-house to ensure freshness.
- Commercial Grills: Cooking without oil is common in Mediterranean cuisine since it is healthier. Grilling meat, seafood, vegetables, or herbs is flavor-rich and oil-free with commercial grills.
Essentials For Greek Cuisine
Greece is located at the shores of the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea, which create a fertile land of various food products, from olive to various herbs, fruits, vegetables, meat, and seafood, which are widely used in Greek cuisine. Additionally, evolving throughout the centuries from the Ancient Greek, Greek cuisine has expanded its scope with exchanges with other cultures such as Turks, Middle Easterners, and other Mediterranean peoples, enriching their meals.
Which Equipment is a Must for Authentic Greek Culinary Traditions?
When the essentials of Greek cuisine are considered, the following commercial kitchen equipment is most necessary for any Greek restaurant if they want to make delicious recipes:
- Mortar and Pestle: Thyme, oregano, mint, and rosemary are the most common herbs used in Greek dishes, and a pair of mortar and pestle will be a great tool for pounding fresh herbs and nuts into smaller pieces without losing their freshness and flavor to make famous Greek salads.
- Cheese Grater: Feta is the national cheese of Greece and is used in most salads or meals. So, getting a high-quality cheese grater will enable you to prepare it for every meal easily.
- Skewers / Gyro Machine: Shish kabab and gyro are Middle Eastern-inspired dishes in Greek cuisine and served mostly with Greek appetizers like tzatziki. You can add skewers to make shish kabab or a gyro machine to make gyro wraps.
- Olive Pitter: Olive is among the basics of Greek cuisine and is used as oil or olives. However, putting olives into salads can be a problem with the olives, especially while having pits. Therefore, getting an oil pitter will be a practical option to get everything soft for your salad.
Choosing Equipment: Size, Budget, Menu
The primary rule of economy also applies in the restaurant industry: “Wants are unlimited, and needs are limited.” Choosing the right equipment for your business is one of the vital considerations in foodservice industry. You must carefully plan your business to make the most out of your investment under your specific conditions. Moreover,
How To Balance Kitchen Size, Menu Diversity, Budget?
Detecting the conditions, classifying the needs in terms of urgency, and calculating the budget are the key steps that will help you use your resources (available space and financial capital). Thus, you should determine the size of your commercial kitchen and how much space you need to allocate to install all these necessary units to serve the estimated number of customers efficiently. Secondly, you must specify the cuisine you want to include in your menu to identify the additional tools and appliances you need to add to your inventory. In the final step, you must consider your budget and plan the spending, starting with the most necessary tools.
Investing in Quality: Cost-Effective Solutions
Investing in high-quality commercial kitchen equipment is generally considered a wise decision, as it often correlates with greater durability and better performance, which can lead to long-term cost savings. High-quality equipment typically requires less frequent repairs and can improve efficiency in the kitchen, which can help offset the initial higher costs.
Additionally, superior equipment can enhance food quality and consistency, bolstering a restaurant’s reputation. So, while the upfront investment may be significant, the return on investment in terms of reliability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction often justifies the expenditure.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the key to a successful commercial kitchen lies in understanding and catering to the specific needs of diverse cuisines. From Italian to Asian, Mexican, and beyond, each cuisine demands unique equipment that directly influences the taste, texture, and presentation of its dishes. Balancing these requirements with factors like kitchen size, budget, and the intended menu is crucial. Investing in high-quality, versatile equipment not only ensures consistency and efficiency in meal preparation but also plays a significant role in enhancing customer satisfaction and boosting profitability.
