In a restaurant, the back line can be a hellish place to be. Cooks move quickly between the tools they use, the cutting board they slice on and the refrigeration system employed by the store. One of the largest pieces of equipment in the back house can be the commercial fryer. The commercial fryer is an essential tool in most restaurants because many foods are in need of a good deep frying. But which fryer will you choose?

Commercial deep fryers come in a variety of sizes. An affordable counter top sized fryer is available from many brands, but these are used mostly by the home chef for special cooking projects. The most commonly seen size of deep fryer is the full size floor model commercial fryer. No matter where you get your french fries or hash browns from, they must first go through four hundred degree oil for three and a half minutes in a full size commercial fryer before reaching your mouth.

Do you know what brand of commercial fryer may be the most popular? I have no fear in saying it is the brand with its purpose in its name: Frymaster! Frymaster makes the smaller single fryer that requires you to have a timer and lower the basket into the oil yourself; Frymaster also makes the monstrous three pit fryer which has a built in timer and lowers the fry baskets for you! That's not all. These fryers tell you when they need to be filtered and have earned an ENERGY STAR rating! The masters of their niche? With a name like that, they ought to be!

A restaurant supply that doesn't offer commercial fryers can't possibly be a restaurant supply. Considering my earlier statement (the commercial fryer is an essential tool in most restaurants...) you may need to double check that you're actually on a restaurant supply web site. When you do find the restaurant supply you're looking for, don't forget that commercial fryers have many necessary accessories. One of these accessories is the gas connector. That's right. These bad boys run off propane or natural gas. Without a gas hose you won't be frying much of anything! Another important accessory are fry baskets! Sure you can throw something in the fryer and fish it out with your unprotected fingers (bad idea) but why do that when the convenience of a stainless steel basket is ready to make your frying experience one hundred times easier!

Another valuable tool a restaurant supply store should offer is an oil disposal tool. Small pieces of fried food are always left behind in the fryer. To maintain your fry oil a daily filtration regimen should be implemented and followed. Unfortunately, despite your efforts, your fry oil is going to go bad, and you will need a method of getting hot fry oil from the fryer to the disposal site outside (I'm assuming you have a shortening disposal box close to your dumpster). A shortening disposal unit is important for safe and efficient disposal of low quality oil. Generally, a disposal unit "plugs" into your fryer and accepts the bad oil. The unit is then rolled outside and the bad oil is pumped into a certified container. Ta-da! No more bad oil and handled like a pro!