Learning to properly serve customers with food allergies can not only save your restaurant a lawsuit, it can save a customer’s life. Assured prevention of an allergic reaction can only be accomplished by protecting the client from any contact, even indirect, with the offending food. This does not mean that you have to become a dairy-free restaurant or offer a fully gluten free restaurant menu, but some precautions are vital. Keeping up-to-date ingredient lists, fastidiously washing all restaurant equipment used on or near allergic customers’ orders, and appointing a team leader to deal with allergy questions are just some of the steps any responsible food service professional should take.

Allergy-Friendly Menu Options

Ensure the availability of safe dishes for allergic customers by educating yourself about common food allergies and intolerances. Ninety percent of food allergies are attributed to peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, fish, milk, wheat, soy, and egg. Common food intolerances that often cause allergy-like symptoms include lactose intolerance and Celiac disease. Place a notice on your door or menu requesting that guests inform you of any food allergy or sensitivity that they may have. Prepare an ...continue reading

An exceptional way to get creative and earn customers, marinating holds a special place in the hearts of professional chefs. Ensure that your meat marinade recipes moisten and tenderize your meats while properly emphasizing their natural flavors. Meat brining techniques perform even better than marinades on turkey and other meats that toughen easily. These pointers will prove especially useful when the meats are then cooked with high quality professional grills, barbeques, and other restaurant equipment.

Marvelous Meat Marinade

Your creativity and better-than-average knowledge of the marinating process are your greatest assets when inventing marinades. The ideal marinade tenderizes the meat while retaining its texture. It should also lend extra flavor that complements and draws out the taste of the meat itself. Citrus juices and wine contain acid that breaks down the meat’s protein and essentially begins the cooking process. An added benefit of these marinade bases is that the acid possesses bacteria-destroying properties. For simplicity’s sake and a distinct flavor, include just a few particularly fascinating ingredients in your marinades rather than using extremely complex recipes. For example, experiment with varieties of honey from a range of flowers until you find one that goes best with the meat you are marinating. An unusual combination of just two or three spices paired with the perfect amount of oil results in flavorful, moist dishes. ...continue reading

Food industry professionals know that soup is among the most profitable menu options. Still, it is often relegated to appetizer status or tacked onto specials as a side dish. Many chefs miss the opportunity to make soups that stand on their own. With the right restaurant equipment – most notably a double boiler – and a few simple changes to your soup recipes and soup-making technique, you can reap the benefits of this low-cost, high-profit restaurant dish while still offering your customers a satisfying main course.

Hearty Restaurant Soup Recipes

Forget thin, watery appetizers. Serve your clients piping hot, cheesy French onion soup with homemade croutons rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil and herbs. Also consider meaty varieties of soup, like Italian Wedding soup or a traditional goulash. Keep in mind, however, that many restaurant-goers these days are looking for healthy options. Adjust your recipes to include leaner cuts of meat or less fatty cheeses and be liberal with the vegetable content. Add thick noodles or rice to existing standards on your menu. This technique keeps costs low while significantly intensifying ...continue reading

Your food distributors make a huge impact on the performance of your business. They determine the quality of your ingredients, so you need to choose wisely. In many cases, a local supplier is the most economically and environmentally sound option. Furthermore, as much as your staff and your restaurant equipment, your wholesale food suppliers need to be reliable so that you can rest assured that your shipments will arrive on time and precisely to order.

Benefits of Local Food Service Suppliers

Selecting local distributors, especially for your produce supplier and meat suppliers, provides you with many advantages. For one thing, a local supplier will be very concerned with every order, since the majority of his best clients are often within the same general area and word-of-mouth can work either against him or in his favor. Also, in case of any issue with one of your orders, you will have a much better chance of speaking with the head of the company in person. Developing a friendly personal relationship with your food distributors can increase ...continue reading

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Every professional baker has plenty of recipes. What you do with those recipes is what keeps your cakes and cookies bakery-quality. Professional cookies should be perfectly moist on the inside and crispy on the outside no matter how large the batch. Bakery cakes need not only to meet those specifications but to hold icing firmly. When your baked goods taste as good as they look, word spreads. With the aid of these hints and state of the art bakery equipment, your sales will soar.

Creating Cakes That Sell

One of the simplest – and easiest to forget – tricks of the trade when baking large numbers of cakes in one oven at the same time is to leave approximately 2 inches between each pan and between the pans and the walls of the oven. Add moisture to particularly heavy cakes by placing a pan of water in the oven and keeping it there throughout the baking time. Prevent unsightly cracks by adding plain gelatin to your batter. Beating the egg yolks with the butter and sugar results in a sweeter cake without the need for a great deal of sugar. Go on to beat the whites well before adding them to achieve a lighter effect. ...continue reading

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An eternal favorite among clients, the classic chocolate truffles recipe can be adapted to many different tastes. Since these high-class desserts actually cost very little to make and can be created rather quickly, it is to your advantage to present your customers with a broad range of varieties. Most chefs already know how to make chocolate truffles, so if you delegate the task to a staff member, a quick review and some fresh ideas are probably all that you need. The key to booming sales is ensuring that you use the best quality ingredients, especially the chocolate, and top rated professional restaurant equipment.

A Symphony of Flavors

If one of the reasons you chose a profession that requires such dedication of your time and energy was to exercise your creativity, chocolate truffles are the project for you. Once you start brainstorming, it will become evident that you can fill an entire section of your menu just with different flavors of truffles if you wish. Strawberry, raspberry, orange, and chocolates of various intensities ...continue reading

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The quality of your sauce can make or break a dish. As a professional chef, you need to set your sauces apart by performing each step in the sauce-making process better than anyone else. Follow these guidelines, using the finest restaurant equipment, and your hollandaise sauce, béchamel sauce, and pesto sauce will have people ordering in no time.

Hollandaise and Bechamel Sauce

The secret to a perfect, classic hollandaise sauce is using a professional grade double boiler to clarify your butter. Add the clarified butter as soon as you take the sauce off of the flame. Use white pepper instead of black to maintain the sauce’s pure color, and add it at the same time as the salt and lemon juice. To spice things up, add the egg yolks to a reduction of white wine with shallots, tarragon, and chervil instead of water. This combination results in an impressive béarnaise sauce. ...continue reading

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Restaurant waste is more costly than perhaps any other part of being a food industry professional. Buying or renting commercial space, purchasing restaurant equipment, and paying top-notch staff all increase your likelihood of turning a great profit. Food waste, on the other hand, is simply that: waste. Food waste hurts your bottom line and the environment. Here, some simple yet highly effective methods of waste reduction for your commercial kitchen.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - Ingredients

One of the most effortless ways in which to reduce food waste in your restaurant is to prevent it. Gauge how much your customers tend to leave over after certain dishes. If there are menu options that consistently result in a great deal of waste, you are serving too much. Cut down on the serving size just enough so that your customers will still be satisfied but will be able to finish more of the meal. Then, freeze single-serving portions of everything that you can. This practice lends you more control over portion size because you will see with more precision how much you put on one plate in comparison to other servings of the same dish. Tailor your menu in such a way that you use ingredients that you normally throw away. For example, if your restaurant serves sushi, you know that the ends generally do not lend themselves to attractive presentation and often become waste. ...continue reading

If you want to gain bigger sales, get out the french fry cutter and spice up your side dish recipes. Side dishes, though often treated as an afterthought by restaurant owners, can augment your sales like nothing else. Most side dish menu items are relatively inexpensive to produce and require only very simple restaurant equipment, meaning that you can sell them separately at a nice profit and also make your platter offerings more attractive to customers without affecting your prices too much. This year, healthy side dishes and creative twists on old classics are big hits with customers.

Vegetable Side Dishes

Considering the fact that the trend of eating healthfully grows more popular each year, it makes sense to pack your menu with vegetable options. Set your restaurant apart by using unusual mixtures and roasting instead of frying or grilling. Appealing color combinations will catch the attention of diners at other tables and encourage them to order the same thing. Think bright, vivacious colors like in a roasted red pepper salad.

It is essential to include French fries on your menu – they remain a customer favorite and a fabulous opportunity for culinary experimentation. Try offering a variety of choices, such as sweet potato fries, spicy fries, and fries of different shapes and sizes. ...continue reading