What is a Rethermalizer?
The food rethermalizer is an excellent way to use frozen foods in a busy commercial kitchen, without risking undue bacterial growth from improper warming methods.
In appearance, this equipment can be pretty similar to other kinds of kitchen cooking equipment, but it has its own very specific uses. Let's talk about why commercial kitchens buy a rethermalizer and use it to warm up various kinds of food inventory items.
How Does A Rethermalizer Work?
A food rethermalizer relies on a hot water bath to heat food. Unlike a sous-vide immersion circulator, a rethermalizer is deliberately made to thaw frozen food and heat it to around 160 Fahrenheit.
The HACCP Danger Zone
A rethermalizer works to strategically heat food, to take it quickly through the ‘danger zone’ at which scientists realize that bacteria can grow more quickly.
HACCP is an established resource for food safety guidance used by agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the USDA. HACCP standards explain why avoiding the danger zone is important. Dealing with the HACCP danger zone means being in compliance with industry standards, so even people without advanced knowledge of food safety have an incentive to use tools like the rethermalizer to keep food at specific temperatures.
Here's the HACCP danger zone:
- Below 41 degrees Fahrenheit, food is considered properly refrigerated and relatively safe from quick bacterial growth.
- Above 140 degrees Fahrenheit, food is considered properly heated and safe to consume.
- Temperatures between 41 degrees and 140 degrees Fahrenheit leave foods exposed to bacteria growth that can lead to food illness.
Restaurant operators and food service people pay a lot of attention to temperature to ensure the highest quality of food.
That's why kitchens use meat thermometers, digital thermometers for food warming trays, and other means of checking food temperatures on a regular basis. Again, it’s for the health of the patrons, but it’s also to comply with established food science.
That's how the rethermalizer works – the hot water bath incrementally and carefully heats up the food to make sure to avoid the danger zone.
Food Warmers Versus Rethermalizers
One of the biggest issues with buying restaurant equipment is when people misunderstand the difference between a food warmer or warming tray, and a rethermalizer.
Food warmers or “bain maries” also use a hot water bath. Commercial suppliers make them in various shapes and sizes, in order to keep things like soups, fried food, pasta, and other hot foods at a safe temperature.
But food warmers are not made for heating frozen food. The rethermalizer is the major piece of equipment that restaurants can use to thaw either food that came from a supplier frozen or food they have prepared and frozen for later service.
Think about it this way – when people send a plate back to a restaurant, it's often due to chicken or fish or meat being undercooked in the center. This is often a problem with strategic reheating (or the lack of it), especially if an item was previously frozen.
So when you think about buying a food warmer versus a rethermalizer, think about the strategic place that the rethermalizer serves in your restaurant kitchen.
Benefits of a Rethermalizer
One benefit of the rethermalizer is efficiency – a rethermalizer with its hot water bath is said to be 10 times more efficient than heating with other types of apparatus.
It's also convenient, with a ‘set it and forget it’ design – so that when the busy chef comes back looking for that item, it’s not only not frozen, it’s at a nice hot temp and ready for use immediately.
As mentioned above, the rethermalizer is also safer because it takes frozen food through the danger zone more safely.
There's also less food waste in many cases since the rethermalizer eliminates some of the trial and error of figuring out a workflow for certain dishes. In terms of serving customers with allergies, a service process using a rethermalizer can help to lower the risk of cross-contamination.
Keep all this in mind as you buy equipment for a restaurant food service business. The rethermalizer is a specialized installation that a kitchen might use many times, daily. Integrated the right way, rethermalizers can lead to vast efficiencies in your kitchen. For everything that you need to supply a restaurant kitchen, turn to the folks at Chefs’ Toys, where we are “for chefs, by chefs.” We have real kitchen experience, and a great e-commerce supply store to help managers and owners to get what they need to succeed.
