CVap® ovens are well known for their ability to stage. In case you’re not familiar, staging involves cooking foods to a temperature that’s at (or just below) their ideal doneness temperature. Winston CVap ovens excel at staging. CVap technology allows the user to precisely control food temperature, so food doesn’t continue to cook (or overcook) and hold the food’s temperature at the desired endpoint for an extended amount of time. Interested in testing our claims? Follow the stage and fry process below using CVap technology.
Why Stage?
Stage and Fry Settings
- Cook Time – approximately 1-1.5 hours
- Cook Vapor Temp – 200°F
- Cook Air Temp 200°F
- Hold Time – 2 hours
- Hold Vapor Temp – 140°F
- Hold Air Temp – 145°F
Stage and Fry Process
- Preheat Cook and Hold Oven to the settings above.
- Add chicken to a rack-lined sheet pan, leaving little space.
- Add pan to oven and allow the chicken to reach an internal temperature of at least 165°F. We used thighs and legs, which took a little over an hour.
- Remove chicken from oven. Batter or bread as you prefer.
- Fry as desired – this step is just to set the breading.
There’s a saying that some folks say around here when talking about staging, “Go slow to go fast.” This means that staging is a critical process to plan ahead of busy periods. By front-end cooking and holding foods at a desired temperature, you’re making serious cuts in the amount of time it takes from when the food is ordered to when it is served. In this case, we’re talking about fried chicken. Frying raw chicken just isn’t very fast. It can take 15 to 20 minutes to cook a big batch of raw fried chicken in a pressure fryer. But if you stage that chicken in a CVap oven, you can cut the serving time by 75 percent.
Save Time, Oil, and Money
The benefit of this process is not limited to time savings. Staging and frying chicken will also help extend the life of the fryer oil, which in turn is a direct cost savings. Breaded raw chicken releases water, fats, and other particulates into the oil during the cooking process. This degrades the oil over time. If you can mitigate a portion of that release by staging in CVap, it could increase the viability of the oil paired with proper SOPs.
