Keeping Your 3 Compartment Sinks Running Smoothly
The heart of any busy restaurant is the kitchen. But the backbone of your commercial kitchen is the dish room. While washing and drying dishes might sound like a simple task, ensuring a smooth and efficient commercial dish room operation presents a unique set of challenges.
Everything that is used in the preparations of meals flows back to the dish room to be cleaned for the next round of customers. If the dish room can’t keep up, then everything grinds to a halt. That’s why any problems in your dish room need to be addressed fast.
One of the biggest challenges is the sheer volume of dishes that a commercial establishment deals with during a busy lunch and dinner rush. From the glasses, plates and silverware served to your customers, to the pots and pans used for cooking, everything needs to be cleaned, dried, and ready for the next use within a short span of time.
This creates a relentless flow of items that need to be cleaned and demands both speed and precision from your dish room staff.
Make Sure Employees Are Properly Trained To Use The Machines
An efficient dish room relies on well-trained, collaborative, and motivated staff. Given the demanding nature of the job, staff turnover can be high, leading to frequent retraining sessions.
Ensuring the well-being, safety, and job satisfaction of these employees is paramount, as their efficiency directly impacts the operation of your establishment.
Proper dishwashing techniques are a key element of any good dish room. Strong processes keep your commercial kitchen running smoothly and promote safe food handling practices.
Your commercial dish machine is an integral part of your dish room. It saves water in the long run, allows your employees to keep busy in between wash cycles, and it cleans a lot of dishes in a short amount of time.
Your kitchen staff should all know how to properly operate the dish machine according to the manufacturer specifications. Wall guides and charts near the dishwasher can be helpful in instructing staff. These may also act as reminders for new employees just starting out.
Take Action Before And After Washing Dishes
The consistency of always having clean dishes can be a significant hurdle. If you accidentally give a customer a dirty fork or glass, they will be on high alert for the remainder of their meal.
With stringent health regulations and the reputation of your establishment on the line, there’s no room for excuses. Every dish, glass, and utensil must meet a high standard of cleanliness, requiring both diligence and attention to detail from the team.
Messy dishes should be scraped before being placed in the dishwasher. Extremely dirty dishes will need to be soaked before they can get scraped. Focus on scorched food or any stains that need additional elbow grease before the standard dishwashing cycle to get fully cleaned.
Letting your dishwasher put the final touches on dishes that are relatively clean will conserve water and energy by only needing one dish machine cycle to complete the process.
After being washed, dishes should be sanitized and left to air dry. Never dry a dish with a used cloth as it might have come in contact with allergens such as meats, glutens, and nuts.
For any dishes being washed by hand in your 3 compartment sinks, you will use each bay to wash, rinse and sanitize.
What About Washing The Dish Machine?
Equipment maintenance is an important part of your dish room. Commercial dish machines, with their powerful jets and high-temperature capabilities, are vital tools in ensuring fast and effective cleaning.
But like all machinery, they are prone to wear and tear. A malfunctioning dishwasher can bring the whole operation to a grinding halt. Regular maintenance, timely repairs, and understanding the nuances of these machines are crucial to avoid unexpected downtimes.
And it may seem counterintuitive, but your dish machine does get dirty during daily use. Food particles like coffee grounds, rice, and noodles all have a habit of sticking around.
These can wind up stuck on the wash arms inside the dish machine. And lemon seeds can get stuck inside water nozzles. Which in turn hurts your dishwasher’s ability to properly clean dishes.
Make sure to have employees deep clean the dishwasher daily to dislodge any food waste. This can be done at the end of the night after it has cooled off. This prevents employees from getting burned from the steam.
Daily deep-cleaning also prevents contamination risks and foul odors. You don’t want the health inspector finding a mold outbreak inside your dish machine.
Maximizing Space To Maximize Your Cleanliness
Design your commercial kitchen in such a way as to maximize space. Most commercial kitchens have a limited footprint, which requires you to get creative on how to design your dish area.
Once you have figured out the layout of your kitchen, next comes the 3 compartment sinks, the dish tables and the dish machine. Knowing the exact capacity of your dish machine helps tremendously when it comes to washing.
A commercial dish machine can only hold a certain capacity before its cleaning efficiency is compromised. Make sure to check the manufacturer specifications to find out how many dishes your dishwasher can hold or you’ll end up having to run it through multiple wash cycles to get everything clean.
Making sure there is enough room for the water to actually clean all the dishes is a must. Cramming everything on top of each other won’t work.
Keeping a good amount of space in your dishwasher also helps avoid chipping or breaking delicates.
Hand-washing glass and ceramics is also worth consideration. This allows delicates to be properly washed and avoids ugly water stains.
Keep Your 3 Compartment Sinks Running Smoothly With Our Scrap Collector
During dish washing, food scraps travel down the drain and into the sewer. This allows your grease interceptor to continue functioning properly. Yet food scraps can build up and cause a flood throughout your kitchen.
With food scraps, broken dishes, and occasional non-biodegradable trash like straws or plastic wrappers, managing waste becomes an intricate task.
It’s essential to have an effective system to segregate and dispose of waste to ensure environmental responsibility and compliance with waste management regulations.
The Drain Strainer™ can help you avoid issues with what gets put down your 3 compartment sinks. No matter how much you focus on employee training, short cuts are always going to be taken and items are going to be put down your commercial garbage disposal that can harm it.
If you want to avoid issues with clogged grease traps or garbage grinders that are leaking or have burned out motors, The Drain Strainer™ is an effective and affordable commercial garbage disposal alternative that doesn’t require the use of water or electricity.
Invented by a former restaurant owner, The Drain Strainer™ can eliminate issues with mangled silverware or dangers from employees putting their hands down the commercial garbage disposal trying to clear out a clog.
Click here to find out more about how our product can keep your restaurant floor drains free from clogs.
While the dish room may not be the star of the show in the eyes of your diners, its smooth operation is vital to your commercial kitchen’s success.
Overcoming its many challenges requires a blend of efficient systems, reliable equipment, dedicated staff, and a constant eye on the standards of cleanliness and hygiene. There are many moving parts, but when choreographed well, the culinary magic in your kitchen has the support it deserves.
Let The Drain Strainer™ keep your 3 compartment sinks running smoothly by capturing food solids and avoiding any drain problems.