The Trials & Tribulations With Holding Fried Products & The Solution

When we fry a product with do so to give flavor, texture, and lock in moisture while cooking the product. The interior remains nice and moist while the exterior of the product remains crispy, crunchy, or flaky, depending on how we prepared it. While this is great food when cooked and served immediately, the trouble has always been with holding these products.

While serving fresh is never an issue, to increase throughput and decrease wait times of customers, it is nice to keep product in holding. By keeping product in holding we can achieve the decreased wait times along with decreasing labor and stress on staff. This, along with increasing throughput will mean increased revenue and increased profit margins.

The issue with frying is that while we lock in moisture, this moisture starts to come out over time. This moisture gets trapped between the product and the batter, breading, or whatever else we used to season the product. This causes the seasoning to start to slough off, get moist and soggy if we hold it too long. The key to holding fried products for extended period of time is multi-stage, programmable holding. By having multi-stage, programmable holding we can hold even fried chicken for up to 6 hours and have it tasty, fresh tasting, fresh looking, and even texture remains fresh. We program the holding cabinet to hold at 165•F (Example) for 60 minutes w/ 20% humidity, keeping product within HACCP and keeping it moist. Then we tell it to increase to 265•F for 4 minutes. This step evaporates the water out of the batter or breading, maintaining its texture and stopping the sloughing of the breading. After this, we return to holding at 165•F w/ 20% humidity. These procedures repeat for up to 6 hours. The result is a fresh tasting, fresh looking, just cooked appearance product, that was safely held.