26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Into The Deep Fat Frying pan

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This morning I had to do the job  that both Ines and I hate most and no, it’s not firing people, it’s changing the oil in the deep-fryer.

In a restaurant the deep fryer is different from the type you may use at home. Instead of being filled with cooking oil, it contains 50% saline water, which cleans the oil.

I decided to take a bit of the horror out of Monday morning for Olivia by emptying the deep fryer myself and then leaving it to our cleaner to clean it out and refill it, whilst we were in San Pedro getting shopping for the bar.

The container that holds the oil is a little deeper than the element and part of the volume below the element level is filled with saline solution (water and salt). The saline solution acts as a filter to keep the oil clean. There is one very important fact that you need to know when refilling an industrial deep-fryer; the water level must never be high enough so that it can come into contact with the element.

The machine holds 2 large jugs of saline water (3L). If the water were ever to be overfilled to the extent that the water and element were touching, there would be a dangerous eruption of boiling hot oil and water, like a mini volcano all over the kitchen. The reason for this is, as long as the water is say 1cm below the oil element level, the water stays cool, but if the machine is overfilled then the water can rise above the element and become heated to boiling point.

If that happened, all the contents of the fryer would blow upwards due to a build up of steam pressure and should this happen, you wouldn’t  want to be in the same room. Even if you were nowhere near the machine, you’d be cleaning oil from every part of your restaurant, kitchen for hours.

It’s very important to know what you are doing when operating a commercial fryer.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 12:58 am and is filed under Business. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: bar tips and tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.