I’ve bought two different commercial rice cookers recently under the illusion that they would cook and then hold my rice at a legal temperature for serving.
It turns out that the keep warm feature only provides enough heat to keep the rice falling below 63°C for a few hours. I’m not sure why a commercial rice cooker wouldn’t provide a comparable heat source to a Bain Marie. Does anyone have any ideas? I don’t want to transfer 20 litres of rice to a Bain Marie as I simply dont have the space in my little catering van.
Best thing for holding rice are the Cambro hot boxes. You can keep rice, pasta, mashed pots hot for well over 3 hours in those sweat boxes with no damage whatsoever. I know this because I did just that for well over 10 years.
A steam table will dry out and crust up the rice in Under an hour--regardless of how many layers of silicone paper, towels, or doubled up inserts you use.
The commercial rice cookers--20 cups and up, keep the rice good and hot for a few hours, but you will get a scorched "rice cake" on the bottom of the pan, but other than that no damage.
you can hold the rice at 68c for 4 hours only, then you will need to chill it down after very quickly to be able to reuse it.then oly once, reheat to 72 c for 12 mins.
How long do you need or expect to be able to hold rice hot for service? More than a "few" hours? Isn't that unreasonable?
Your best bet might just be batch cooking...doing 1 batch at the start of service and another partway through. If your service lasts long enough that you need to hold rice hot for longer than a "few" hours you should be cooking another batch anyways to maintain quality.
EDIT: Whoops, didn't see this was from a few years ago. Glad you found something that worked.
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