It’s important to clean the floors and counters in your restaurant kitchen on a daily basis. But there are some other kitchen cleaning tasks that you do not need to perform as frequently. To ensure that your equipment does not get too dirty to be used correctly, you should do a deep cleaning of your restaurant once a month. This process should include the following areas.
Wash and Scrub Exhaust Hoods
Cleaning the hoods over stoves and ovens is crucial to keeping the air quality healthy for everyone who works in the kitchen. You should start by removing the filters from the hoods and washing them thoroughly. Then, scrub down the hoods themselves to remove any baked-on grease or soil. The traditional way to clean this equipment is to soak the filters in a sink full of hot, soapy water, and scrub the hoods with degreaser solution. These are both dirty jobs, and they require safety equipment to avoid chemical burns and damage to eyes.
A better solution is to use a spray-and-vac cleaning system, like Kaivac’s OmniFlex Spray-and-Vac. After applying cleaning solution to the surface, a powerful jet of water will rinse away all grease and soil, leaving the equipment clean and free of contaminants. Rather than letting filters air dry for hours, you can use the powerful vacuum to remove all the moisture from inside the filters.
Address Shelves in Walk-In Refrigerators
Walk-in refrigerators are constantly used by most restaurants all day long. Most managers have the floors cleaned every night, the door handles wiped when needed, and the entrance way mopped once or twice a day. This still leaves out the part of the walk-in refrigerator that gets the most use: the shelves. You should pull out all the food from your walk-in refrigerator’s shelves once a month and use a spray-and-vac system to apply cleaning solution. Then, use the powerful spray to remove soil and foreign objects. You can use the same solution to clean the interior of the walk-in refrigerator from top to bottom, including the walls, the inside of the door, and the floor and entrance way.
Deep Clean Steam Boxes
They might be called proofing boxes, steam boxes, or hot boxes. These large pieces of equipment provide a moist environment in which to hold warm, prepared food. Notoriously, steam boxes can grow slimy interiors within a few weeks after cleaning. This happens when the unit cools, and the interior steam and grease droplets get deposited all over the interior walls. You can also use a spray-and-vac to clean the walls and remove the layer of grease you find inside. Then you can vacuum away all the moisture from inside the unit, leaving it clean, dry, and bacteria-free.
For more information about Kaivac deep cleaning of restaurant equipment, explore our Cleaning Machines for food service.
