Innovative deep fryer improves food quality and worker safety
Deep fryers are essential for making certain fried foods. Such foods, being quick to make and tasty, are also increasingly popular in restaurants. Growing restaurant demand has led to improvements in kitchen practices. Nonetheless, deep frying remains messy and dangerous. Restaurants deal with the smoke via expensive mandatory ventilation systems, which nevertheless do not fully protect cooks. Ongoing problems with standard deep fryers include high fire danger, high energy consumption and inefficient use of oil.
Enclosed cooking
The EU-funded FC-Unlimited(opens in new window) project developed a new style of enclosed deep fryer system for restaurants that solves these and many other problems. The project team developed and tested a beta prototype, called ECOFRY(opens in new window), and obtained certification for the American, Australian, European and Japanese markets. Extensive marketing research also yielded a detailed business plan. “The main advantages of our ECOFRY system is the technology made available to our customers: Enclosed frying chamber that makes the unit clean and safe and the automatisation of the whole process,” says Juan de Sala, project coordinator and QualityFry board member. Competitor enclosed designs may offer locking lids, but behind them cooks still face an open pool of boiling oil. In contrast, ECOFRY features an internally enclosed frying chamber that protects kitchen workers from burns and other dangers. The unit’s built-in fume system deals with the smoke and odours. Meanwhile, the enclosed design also insulates the box, making it more energy efficient.
Superior performance
Testing showed the average energy consumption of the fryer to be 2.0 kW/h. By comparison, a traditional fryer operates at 1.8 kW/h on its own, plus a further 3.8 kW/h for the extraction system. So ECOFRY is over 2.5 times more energy efficient. Testing also demonstrated lower oil consumption compared to conventional products. The equipment uses 1 l of oil for every 1.2 l competitor products use. The difference is due to an automatic drainer that recovers oil that conventional products would waste. The equipment offers 21 programmes, which manage frying temperature and duration of the frying process. Unlike other enclosed fryers, the ECOFRY prototype is internet-capable and permits a high degree of automation. “With these two parameters set,” adds de Sala, “this standardises the food’s quality, texture and degree of crispiness.” Such features are well appreciated in restaurants where the food must always meet the same quality standards. Automation frees the cook from supervising, improving worker productivity and preventing human error. The team’s demonstrations to distributors, supermarkets and potential customers in the catering industry led to general acceptance in those sectors. This opens the door to a large potential market, of over 100 000 food retail locations in Europe and the United States, with a further 1.8 million potential locations in the rest of the project’s market areas. The company’s Unlimited models are already available. The Unlimited 2.0 model should be released during 2020. It will include automatic monitoring of oil quality and removal of degraded oil. With general market acceptance already achieved, the product seems set to become widespread within food preparation industries. This will lead to a corresponding increase in food quality.
