PUNTOITALY N°1 -January - June 2012

WHAT IS FRESH Sometimes you can hear some cooks saying that they doesn’t use the blast chiller because they like to prepare everything fresh. Good point, but try to asking the meaning of freshness, and you can get the weirdest answers. We know that is impossible to prepare everything at the last moment, in fact chefs start to prepare sauces, baked pota- toes early in the morning, ready for lunch time. Oxidation and aging of the product start as soon as the prod- uct is ready. Unfortunately the product doesn’t know that it should remain fresh at least all day and that we would very much appreciate a good freshness for tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow and 2 days after tomorrow. Reaching this goal of freshness is possible only if the product is blocked the moment it is ready. Quickly cooling down a sauce to below 10°C, as soon as it is ready, will assure a shelf life of days if correctly kept at 4°C. This doesn’t mean forget- ting it in the fridge for weeks, but keeping it good for a week is a reasonable goal. PLEASE DON’T WASTE IT No one knows how many customers will eat at their restau- rant, it is something that is predictable only by experience. But not even this experience will tell us how many of them will ask for a particular dish and it is always unpleasant to an- swer them with “We are sorry, we have run out “. To manage this uncertainty, unless you have the crystal ball, there is only one solution: to prepare more food risking wast- The use of the blast chiller begun in the ‘70s in France to prepare safe food for hospitals. From then a good number of cooks have created new techniques using it. Technology 62