Thinking outside the box...

Myself and Mike (my business partner for the mexican takeaway) have been getting very frustrated in trying to find a restaurant to let in our target area. We visited a friend who runs a milkshake bar yesterday to get some advice on shopfitting-type costs and various bits and bobs. He runs his business from a retail unit, which is perfectly legal as he doesn't 'make' hot food on the premises, but he does 'reheat' things such as paninis and the sort. This got the wee cogs turning in our brain, and we started chatting...

We know how difficult it has been getting a property with the right planning consent (Class A3), but one thing that is in abundance at the moment due to the credit crunch is quality retail property (Class A1). We thought about how we could utilise this to our advantage, and so we sat and talked about what we were trying to do, and what menu items we are going to sell.

We realised that the only thing that was holding us back on our menu was the cooking of meat. We don't plan on deep-frying anything and everything we serve is heated or steamed rather than cooked. Rice and beans aren't really classed as 'cooking' as such, and so it's fine to make these on your premises without restaurant consent. Serving drinks and tortillas with salsa or guacamole is obviously fine, it's just the cooking of the meat that is holding us back. So, that set our minds racing.

Is there a way we can cook the meat elsewhere (such as an industrial kitchen), refrigerate and deliver it then reheat it without losing the quality or taste of the finished product?

Well apparently there is. 'Sous Vide'. Sous-vide, French for "under vacuum", is a method of cooking that is intended to maintain the integrity of ingredients by heating them for an extended period at relatively low temperatures. Food is cooked for a long time, sometimes well over 24 hours. Unlike cooking in a slow cooker, sous-vide cooking uses airtight plastic bags placed in hot water well below boiling point (usually around 60°C). There's a picture of one in action below;



The beauty of Sous-vide is that you cannot overcook meats, and that it's done almost automatically in a water-bath. Being vacuum-packed, none of the flavour or freshness can escape, and assuming it's refrigerated, you can store it for up to ten days safely. You csn use the same method to quickly reheat a cooked meat product, which produces fabulous results. Groundbreaking Superchef Heston Blumenthal is known to use the method, and it's rumoured that some of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants do this in an industrial kitchen and simply deliver the products for use in his restaurants afterward. If it's good enough for those guys, it's good enough for me!

Needless to say; we need to do more digging on the subject, but it's a start and it may provide a simple, cheap, automatic cooking method that allows us to reheat food in store without any loss of flavour or freshness. That would allow us to use a retail unit instead of a restaurant one, and would save us tens of thousands of £. We could also get a retail unit in a fabulous area for buttons at the moment. Watch this space, with interest...



p.s. I'm off to France until Friday; won't be posting again until I'm back, full of croissants, snails and frog's legs, yum!